Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wanted the public to know Monday that there’s an argument to be made for President Joe Biden being a larger threat to democracy than Donald Trump, although, despite giving an impassioned answer about how Biden’s administration has supposedly wronged him greatly, Kennedy still insisted that he himself would never make that argument.
In a lengthy CNN interview on Erin Burnett OutFront, Kennedy was questioned about his equivocating stance on the subject.
“When people talk about the threat to democracy that Trump poses, do you think that that is equal to Biden?” Burnett asked.
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“Listen, I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy and the reason for that is President Biden is… the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech so it censors his opponent,” Kennedy claimed.
“I can say that because I just won a case in the federal court of appeals—now before the Supreme Court—that shows he started censoring not just me, but 37 hours after he took office he was censoring me,” he went on.
Kennedy was apparently referring to a preliminary injunction he won in February in his lawsuit claiming the government improperly leaned on social media platforms to censor his statements about vaccines.
Kennedy’s conspiratorial opinions on vaccines have in part caused many of his family members to oppose his candidacy.
Kennedy then seemed to gloss over Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election.
“The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States who will use the power of his office to force social media companies—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, CIA, the IRS, the…NIH, to censor his political critics,” he said. “Those are really critical threats to democracy.”
Kennedy also lashed out at Biden for not granting him Secret Service protection, even though there are doubts as to whether he even meets the criteria for such treatment.
Burnett returned to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “How is that not a threat to democracy?”
“Well, I think that is a threat to democracy—him trying to overthrow the election clearly is a threat to democracy,” Kennedy replied. “But the question was, ‘Who is a worse threat to democracy?’ And what I would say is, you know, I am not going to answer that question, but I can argue that President Biden is because the First Amendment, Erin, is the most important.”
Burnett then sought to clarify that Kennedy said he “could make an argument that President Biden is a worse threat to democracy than Donald Trump.”
“Absolutely,” Kennedy affirmed. “What president in history has ever tried to censor political opponents?”
Earlier in the interview, Kennedy, whose campaign announced Monday that he has obtained enough signatures to get on the North Carolina ballot in November, was asked about the likelihood that he could be a “spoiler.” Kennedy is also set to be on the ballot in Hawaii, New Hampshire, Utah and Nevada, which Biden won in 2020 by less than 2.4 percentage points.
Kennedy insisted he was indifferent as to whether his long-shot bid takes more votes from Biden or Trump.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” he said.
Burnett then confronted him with comments he had made before the razor-thin 2000 election—which George W. Bush barely won—in which he said Green Party candidate Ralph Nader could harm Democrat Al Gore.
In a New York Times opinion piece, for instance, Kennedy wrote that Nader “dismisses his spoiler role by arguing that there is little distinction between the major parties’ candidates and that Mr. Gore has compromised on too many issues.”
That argument, he went on to write, was “irresponsible.”
