RFK Jr. Takes on Trump and Biden Over Four ‘Existential’ Issues

In this wide-ranging interview, I get independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candid take on the biggest challenges he sees facing America today.
What does RFK Jr. see as the path forward when it comes to the rise in chronic diseases among young Americans, big tech manipulation, the Israel-Gaza war, and the threat of communist China?

Transcript:

Mr. Jekielek:
You said you’re running to win. The most recent RealClearPolitics poll says 41 percent for Trump, 39 percent for Biden, and 11 percent for you.
How can you be running to win?
Mr. Kennedy:
Every poll that has been done that looks at me in a head-to-head, two-person race with President Biden, I win by a landslide. If it was just me and President Biden in the race, I would beat him in a landslide. In a head-to-head race against President Trump, I beat him as well. President Biden loses to him. My favorability ratings are better than both of them. All of this data indicates people would prefer to vote for me over the two of them.

My challenge is the fear factor. You can ask people, “Why are you voting for President Biden?” They will very rarely say that he’s brought great vigor and energy to the office, and we expect things to happen in the next term. Almost 100 percent of people will tell you they are voting for him because they are scared President Trump will get elected and it’s going to be the end of the republic.

The same is true to a lesser extent with President Trump. A lot of the people who are supporting him fear that President Biden is going to get reelected and get us into a war or just deteriorate in office. People are generally voting out of fear. Depending on what poll you read, between 70 and 80 percent of Americans don’t want to vote for either President Trump or President Biden.

They don’t want to see that contest again. They would rather vote for me. My challenge is how do I get Americans to vote out of hope rather than out of fear? My challenge over the next six months is to see if democracy still works. During the convention in 1932 President Roosevelt said, “The only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.”

He was saying that because he was watching what was happening in Europe. The global depression had given rise to demagogues on the Left in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and on the Right in Italy, Spain, and Germany. All of them were using fear to manipulate public opinion.

That’s why President Roosevelt said to the American public, “Whatever we do, we can’t give in to fear. We have to have confidence in our system. We’re supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. The reason that we are the land of the free is because we are the home of the brave.” That has always been the presumption. My job is to remind Americans that we can’t be responding out of fear.

Mr. Jekielek:
People often vote for the lesser of two evils. You’re telling me there are barriers to the democratic process playing out here. But you’re still only polling at 11 percent. There are these legal cases against former President Trump where he might not be able to run in the election. A lot of our analysts are saying that’s the end game, but that would actually be a barrier to the democratic process. It’s almost like you would perform well in that situation because it would be you vs. Biden.
Mr. Kennedy:
I’m not sitting around hoping that something happens to President Trump or President Biden, but it is a very bizarre election year. I’m looking at two candidates right now who are very different in disposition, in personality, in ideology, and in the way they relate to people. On the issues where they differ, there is this very narrow Overton window.

They differ on guns. They differ on abortion. They differ on transgender rights and the border and a few other culture war issues. They’re all important issues. But our country is facing a series of existential issues and neither of them even has an opinion on them, and neither of them can do anything about them.

One of those is the debt. We have a $34 trillion debt. We’ve added a trillion dollars in the last hundred days and it’s growing exponentially. The cost of servicing that debt now exceeds our defense budget. Within five years, the cost of servicing this debt will be 50 cents out of every dollar that the federal government collects in taxes.

Within 10 years, it will be 100 percent, so this is existential for our country. It means defaulting on the debt or taking some other radical course that will be devastating to the middle class, to private ownership, and to everything that we believe in.

Yet, President Trump and President Biden have no capacity to deal with this issue. Why is that, and why do they never discuss it? Because those presidents ran up a bigger portion of that debt than any other presidents in history.

President Trump, in just four short years, ran up $8 trillion, which is more than all the presidents combined from George Washington to George W. Bush. That is 283 years of history. President Biden is in a rush during his four years to match that. This is an issue neither of them have the capacity to resolve. It’s an existential issue.

Neither of them has the capacity to resolve the polarization of our country, which is existential. People look at this and say, “How is this ever going to have a good ending?” It’s more toxic than probably any time since the American Civil War. But now it’s driven by these social media algorithms which are self-executing and self-learning.

Those algorithms have discovered that the way to keep people’s eyeballs on that site, which is their money-generating capacity, is to feed people information that fortifies their existing worldview. If you’re a Republican living next door to a Democrat, you can ask the same question on Google and you’ll get two different answers. Each one of you will feel that the answer that you got actually fortifies and pours concrete on the things you already believe, so the chasm between us gets deeper and deeper and harder and harder to bridge.

Something has to happen. Neither President Trump or President Biden are capable of ending that polarization because both of them are the products of it. Both of them feed it. Both of them are telling their followers, “You have to vote for me because that person is evil.”

There is a chronic disease epidemic. When my uncle was president, six percent of kids had chronic disease. Today, it’s 60 percent. Diabetes, which is mitochondrial dysfunction, is now larger. The costs of dealing with it are now greater than our defense budget. Autism has gone from either one in 2,500 or one in 10,000 in my generation, depending on what study you believe.

In 70-year-old men today, one in 10,000 of us or one in 2,500 of us has full blown autism. In my kids generation, it’s one in every 22 boys, or one in every 34 kids. This is existential. It’s not sustainable, and it’s getting worse and worse, exponentially.

Both of these presidents were part of the Covid response. They are incapable of challenging the institutions that could actually end that chronic disease epidemic. If we’re going to survive as a nation, we need to end it.

Military recruiting is now down 41 percent this year, and they can’t find people who are capable to serve anymore. That’s just one issue. But again, the impact on our budget is existential. The addiction to forever wars is existential. President Biden is for all these wars. He’s a big proponent of war as the leading option in U.S. foreign policy.

President Trump, on the other hand, has said that he’s anti-war, but he just colluded with Speaker Johnson and President Biden to send $61 billion to Ukraine. He came into office on an anti-war platform, but he appointed John Bolton to be National Security Advisor, and Mike Pompeo to run the State Department. These are neocon warmongers.

If people want more of the same, which I don’t think anybody does, they can vote for one of those two candidates. My job is to say to people, “You have an option. You don’t have to choose those people.” More people want to vote for me, but they know they’re not going to ,because they’re scared of wasting their vote and letting one of the other guys win.
Mr. Jekielek:
Right.
Mr. Kennedy:
My job is to convince people that I can win. Once people are convinced that I can win, then I will win.

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