If Thursday evening’s Trump-Biden debate wasn’t wild enough, enter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to add himself into the mix.
The independent presidential candidate, while not on the debate stage Thursday in Atlanta alongside Joe Biden and Donald Trump, nevertheless answered the same questions during a livestream on X, which he dubbed “The Real Debate.”
Adding himself to a split screen of the actual CNN debate, Kennedy stood on a Los Angeles stage with Fox Business host John Stossel moderating. He began by reiterating his claim that CNN colluded with each major party’s presumptive nominee to prevent him from participating in the debate, and from there attacked both men regarding their handling of the economy.
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“[Trump] did have a strong economy, but anybody can have a strong economy by borrowing $8 trillion, because you’re forcing our children to pay for our present-day prosperity with this enormous debt, which ultimately is paid for by the poor, by people of fixed incomes,” Kennedy said.
“These two presidents shut down every business in our country—3.3 million businesses—with no due process, no just compensation,” he argued, referring to COVID-era mandates.
“We have a $34 trillion debt now. The interest alone on that debt is costing us more than our military budget. This is existential. This is one of the problems neither of these two will talk about. This is the reason that they need me on stage, because I would confront them with what they did,” Kennedy continued.
“They were the ones who ran up half of this deficit … and that’s what’s causing inflation. We’ll never deal with the inflation if we don’t deal with the money printing problem, and neither of them are going to do it.”
On the topic of abortion, Kennedy said it should be “limited” in “late term.”
“That’s what was permitted under Roe v. Wade. That’s what every European country has—the same law, and that law makes sense,” he said. “If that baby is fully viable outside of the womb, the state has an absolute interest in protecting it.”
Kennedy then took a harsher view of Biden than Trump when it came to how each has addressed migrant crossings at the southern border.
“I think President Trump is right that there’s a lot of bad people coming across. I think that’s undisputed and we’re seeing a rise in crime that is associated with the immigrants, but more importantly, there’s just a sheer number of them,” he said, without providing evidence.
“I think a lot of the Democrats allowed this to happen out of a humanitarian impulse, out of the impulse of compassion. But when you're actually down there and talking to people, it’s not a compassionate solution."
A second presidential debate has been scheduled for September on ABC, though Kennedy’s participation hasn’t yet been determined.
