Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the unconventional Democrat siphoning double-digit party support away from President Biden ahead of the 2024 nominating contests, won’t rule out building a wall along the southern border if it means stopping the flow of illegal immigrants who have poured into the U.S. on Mr. Biden’s watch.
Unlike Mr. Biden and much of the Democratic Party, Mr. Kennedy doesn’t believe the government should force an end to fossil fuels or ban guns to stop the epidemic of mass shootings.
The 69-year-old environmental lawyer and anti-vaccination advocate defines himself as a “traditional Kennedy Democrat.” Yet his policies resonate with a much broader array of voters, including Republicans and, in particular, the expanding swath of people who identify as independents.
Among Democratic voters, Mr. Kennedy siphoned away 19% of the vote from Mr. Biden in a recent Fox News poll.
“I think there are a lot of Americans who believe the Republican and Democratic parties no longer represent their aspirations and visions and interests,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview with The Washington Times.
Mr. Kennedy barged onto the political scene as the leading Democratic Party spoiler in the 2024 primaries, irritating party leaders grappling with Mr. Biden’s historically weak poll numbers.
Mr. Biden announced his reelection bid last month amid sagging support from voters. A poll found former President Donald Trump, the leading Republican primary candidate, winning by 6 percentage points in a general election matchup. Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Biden’s faltering numbers show that voters want change.
“I’ve known Joe Biden for 40 years,” Mr. Kennedy said. “He’s been a friend of my family’s. He’s been a personal friend of mine. But I don’t think he’s doing a good job of running the country.”
His positions on key issues veer drastically from today’s Democratic Party platform and attract Americans who are fed up with COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns and are angry with the federal government’s increasingly intrusive surveillance tactics.
Although Mr. Kennedy has spent much of his career as an environmental lawyer, he has emerged as one of the nation’s most vocal vaccination critics and has questioned the safety and side effects of some shots.
His audience grew in the pandemic era as he publicly railed against the COVID-19 shots and mandates after reports of significant side effects and even deaths.
His rhetoric got him banned on some social media platforms, but his fan base grew.
In 2021, Mr. Kennedy authored a book that took shots at the nation’s chief COVID-19 adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci. He blamed Dr. Fauci for forcing the nation into devastating quarantines and lockdowns and for pushing vaccines with questionable efficacy that have made many people sick.
His book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” became a bestseller “despite censorship, boycotts from bookstores and libraries and hit pieces against the author,” an online description boasts.
Mr. Kennedy has embraced extreme positions on the environment. He once argued in a blog post for the environmental group EcoWatch that companies “which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty.”
Despite his dislike of oil companies, Mr. Kennedy doesn’t support the government-forced end to fossil fuels that his party embraces.
Instead, he envisions renewables taking over the power grid after the federal government ends subsidies to the nation’s energy producers so that the free market determines the survival of natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind and solar.
“It’s going to be wind and solar, by the way, because it costs about a billion dollars a gigawatt to build a solar plant, and it costs $16 billion to build a new nuke plant,” Mr. Kennedy said.
In another sharp break from the Democratic Party, Mr. Kennedy said he is solidly for the Second Amendment and doesn’t support proposals to ban guns. He said it won’t solve the epidemic of deadly shootings.
Instead, doctors should stop overprescribing psychiatric drugs to American youths, he said, which has caused an epidemic of mental instability and provoked many of the mass shootings committed by young people.
“People who say that they’re going to reduce violence by taking guns away are simply not being honest,” Mr. Kennedy said. “And given the recent attacks on our constitutional rights, it’s simply polarizing to try to go after the Second Amendment and people’s guns. That’s not something my administration is going to do.”
The nation needs to rein in spending, Mr. Kennedy said. The costs associated with Medicare and Medicaid can be drastically curbed, he said, by employing policies promoting health and building immunity to end chronic diseases causing an unsustainable drain on federal health care entitlements.
“I’m going to end the chronic disease epidemic, which is right now 80% of our medical dollars,” Mr. Kennedy said.
While promoting civil liberties in a manner that aligns him more with former President Donald Trump than Mr. Biden, Mr. Kennedy has embraced some of the most far-left views of the Democratic Party.
He was a friend and admirer of Cuba’s late dictator, Fidel Castro, and said the island nation’s embrace of communism has been beneficial.
Like Castro, he does not believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, his uncle. Mr. Kennedy made headlines this month by suggesting that the CIA played a role. He called for releasing government files on the killing that have been shrouded in secrecy for 60 years.
“President Biden is still keeping thousands of pages heavily redacted, including 44 pages related to a shadowy CIA agent and a covert program that had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald just months before my uncle was killed,” Mr. Kennedy recently tweeted. “Nobody should be surprised when Americans are distrustful of a government that refuses to reveal 60-year-old secrets. The American people are entitled to see every document, as the law requires.”
Mr. Kennedy said he would soon begin campaigning in the Democratic Party’s early primary states. He will talk to voters about his vision of ending U.S. involvement in foreign wars and protecting the nation by ringing the U.S. border with the military to shield it from threats.
“We should protect America,” Mr. Kennedy told The Times. “We should not have 800 military bases around the world.”
Mr. Kennedy would reduce Pentagon spending to help cut the deficit and increase funding for domestic programs, including education and social welfare for the poor.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Kennedy will face questions about the porous southern border, which the Biden administration has essentially left open and allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to stream into the U.S. illegally.
It has become a top concern among voters and is one of the issues most politically damaging to Mr. Biden.
A recent Global Strategies Group poll found that 58% of voters in key swing states disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of the border crisis, and more than half said the president is ignoring the problem.
Mr. Kennedy said he would end illegal immigration at the border completely, but he must explain to voters how he plans to stop the flow.
“I’m going to make the border impervious,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Am I going to put up a wall? I have to look at what’s happening down there and educate myself about what works and what doesn’t. My policy as president will be to make the border impervious.”
Mr. Kennedy’s Trumpian views on several issues, including opposing biological men in women’s sports, have led to chatter that one of the most iconic names in politics might appear on the November ballot alongside the former president.
It’s not happening, Mr. Kennedy announced on Twitter.
“Just to quell any speculation, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES will I join Donald Trump on an electoral ticket,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Our positions on certain fundamental issues, our approaches to governance, and our philosophies of leadership could not be further apart.”
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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