Who does RFK Jr pose the bigger threat to: Joe Biden or Donald Trump?
2024-05-24 00:27:12
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
This is The Guardian.
Last week it was announced that Donald Trump and Joe Biden have finally agreed to hit the debate stage for a rematch. It'll happen in June.
The Biden and Trump campaigns, opted to bypass the Commission on Presidential Debates and privately agreed to a debate hosted by CNN on June 27th and another hosted by ABC News on September 10th.
And while the rest of us contemplate which of the pair stands to lose more by going head to head, another candidate is working hard to join them.
So RFK Jr. wants in on that first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the famed political dynasty doesn't even have the support of his own family, and yet in national polls he's doing better than any third party candidate in decades. So who does RFK Jr. pose the bigger threat to, Joe Biden or Donald Trump?
I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.
A decade or so ago, when he was in the middle of a very, very contentious divorce with his second wife, and they were fighting, as people do, about alimony and such things, he gave a deposition in which he said that they had found a dead brain worm inside his head.
David Korn is the Washington bureau chief of the progressive magazine Mother Jones. He's talking here about reports from a couple of weeks back that, according to RFK Jr., a health problem he experienced in 2010 was caused by a worm that got into his brain, ate a portion of it and died.
So it was like, my health is being impaired by this. I'm not making as much money, so I can't give you as much money as you want when we become divorced. He now claims, oh, everything was fine, these things do happen, which some medical experts say, yes, it's not cancer, it's a virus. But we get lost in the bizarreness of this. It turns out he was making a lot of money and he was doing just fine.
But at the time, he said he had brain fog and he had mental competency issues because of this. And yet now he's running for president. His spokesman told CBS News, quote, the issue was resolved more than 10 years ago and he's in robust physical and mental health. Questioning Mr. Kennedy's health is a hilarious suggestion, given his competition.
I was going to say, it's not exactly what you want on the resume if you are age 70, running for the world's highest office. If people think you're a guy with big health problems, although, truth be told, they were going to think that anyway because he has had health issues and those are audible in the way he speaks.
Yes, he has a condition that makes, that attacks his vocal cords and gives him this very, very raspy voice. I think it makes it problematical for people to listen to me. I cannot listen to myself on TV. I will never listen to this broadcast and I won't listen to any. So I feel sorry for you guys having to listen to me.
Which doesn't seem to have been holding him back, at least politically. It's fair to say that Donald Trump has busted, destroyed, demolished, annihilated almost all standards for being president, particularly those of social decency and strong character. Because the other thing that doesn't get talked much about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is all the personal misconduct that's been widely documented, even in his own words, over his lifetime.
Extramarital affairs, drug use. I'm very active in recovery. I go to probably nine meetings a week. Now you can say he got over all this, yes, but these are things that would have been quite scandalous in the past. But now they are out front and center.
And, like Donald Trump, he leans into it when he says, I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I would win.
I mean, it's absolutely right that Donald Trump didn't just rewrite the political playbook of old, but he ripped it up and then burnt the shreds in a bonfire. And there is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warming his hands by it, because he's plausible in a way, because Trump has already been president. Let's just tell us more about this candidate, because obviously the name brings a whole lot of history to it.
His father, Bobby Kennedy, famously loved by idealists in American politics, assassinated in 1968.
. But what more can you tell us about R.F.K. Jr., his family, his backstory, his views, and particularly, because I think this leaps out a little bit, his connection to comedy giant Larry David.
You go right to the important part quickly there. Yeah, always. Well, you know, the Kennedy family is probably the most storied political family in America. We used to call it a dynasty, or, as you would say, dynasty. And it's always been a democratic family.
It's always been very liberal, very progressive. And Robert F. Kennedy is a tragic figure that people are still fascinated by. Senator Kennedy has been shot.
Is that possible? Is that possible?
Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen? It is possible? Yes.
Not only Senator Kennedy. Oh, my God. He was John F. Kennedy's younger, ruthless brother when Kennedy ran for president, when John Kennedy ran for president, when he served in the White House. And then, after his brother's assassination in 1963, he kind of took a turn and became a much more passionate and compassionate politician as senator from New York state and then running in 1968, and became kind of the darling of the center left in America and almost an archetype for Democrats.
That's not what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is providing. He really has been driven for the last decade or so by a fierce adherence to conspiracy theories. First, it was vaccines are causing autism or are dangerous and that no vaccines are safe, although he claims he didn't say that.
But he did say that. There's no vaccine that is safe and effective. And then that kind of merged into COVID, in which he raised questions about COVID.
He repeated a conspiracy theory that the virus was, quote, ethnically targeted against certain.
groups, while sparing Jewish and Chinese people. And accused Dr. Tony Fauci and the pharma companies and others of conspiring to advance this idea of vaccination in order to make money. He's peddled all sorts of things about AIDS, about 5G networks affecting your brain cells, of course, about the assassinations of his uncle and his father. Robert Kennedy Jr.
told The Washington Post that once he saw the autopsy report, quote, I didn't feel it was something I could dismiss. I was disturbed. the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. His connection to Larry David is that his third wife is Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David's wife on the show Curb Your Enthusiasm. So it gives him this sort of Hollywood connection where he's lived for the last few years as well.
I have to say, in the 90s and into the early 2000s, before he took a turn towards anti-vaccination conspiracy theory, he was mostly known as an environmental lawyer and advocate suing polluters. And he gained a lot of credibility with that. But then, as I say, he took this very, very sharp turn into the world of conspiracy.
Whatever the explanation, it certainly alienated him from his own family.
That's right. The Kennedy family endorses Joe Biden for president.
They've gone out of their way, almost all of them, to to endorse Joe Biden instead. And one of John Kennedy's grandsons has been mocking RFK Jr., his cousin, online. So you can imagine what kind of family gatherings around the Thanksgiving table that's going to lead to. But the larger point is that he is, you would think, out of step with most Democrats because of his politics. And yet he has this absolutely fabled Democratic name, which brings us to the big political question, which is who he hurts.
Does he take, drain support away from Democrats who see the Kennedy name and think, yeah, that's my guy? Or does he drain support away from Donald Trump because of his conspiracy? theorists, among other things, appeal to that MAGA base?
What's your view? You know, it's an interesting question that has bounced around a lot for the last year. And I think initially the easy answer was it hurts Joe Biden. He's a Democrat. If Democrats are disaffected with Biden, people, you know, in communities that looked up to the Kennedys, you know, if they weren't paying close attention to what he was saying, he might draw votes from them and take those votes away from Biden.
President Biden's campaign is increasingly concerned that the independent bid of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who promotes conspiracies, could hurt Biden's reelection efforts. But as the race has gone along, some people are thinking that it may well be that because, as you noted, his conspiratorial views and his attack on the Biden regime, as he puts it, he may draw people who might otherwise consider voting for Trump.
The Democrats, though, even if he poses potentially a danger to Trump, the Democrats have been spooked by third party candidates. They are sort of very nervous about them because they've been burnt before. And I'm thinking in particular of 2000,, where Ralph Nader got just enough, tens of thousands of votes to outnumbering the lead that Bush had over Gore. And so tipping states, it seems, two, Bush away from Gore. And then again in 2016,, when Green Party candidate Jill Stein didn't get many.
But if you get a few thousand votes in a state that is nail-bitingly close, it can tip the balance. That is the danger I suppose many Democrats fear with an RFK, Jr. candidacy. And the funny thing is your reporting brings out that Kennedy himself understood that danger back in 2000..
Yeah, he wrote an op-ed back in 2000,, a newspaper column for The New York Times in which he basically said Ralph Nader, this progressive environmental advocate, consumer champion, should not run for president, because if he did, he could tip the race from Al Gore to George W. Bush. And George W. Bush's environmental policies would be horrendous compared to Al Gore and climate change and a number of key issues. So basically he pleaded with Ralph Nader not to do this.
He would be a spoiler. And now that's exactly the position that Robert Kennedy is placing himself in. So, I mean, there is a megalomaniacal quality to what's happening in Kennedy's campaign. I've talked to people close to him and known him for years who are upset or enraged about this campaign. And they tell me that he really believes he's going to win, that he is going to become president.
I talked earlier about whether he was delusional or not. I think there's an element of delusion to that as well, because it ain't going to happen. But what he could do is end up doing exactly what he criticized Ralph Nader for trying to do 24 years ago.
It's so interesting because, of course, that means, on that logic, he doesn't think he's a potential spoiler or worried about siphoning votes, because if, all bit delusionally, he thinks he's going to win. It's a different thing. I suppose. the other thing people with the Hebrew might point out to is, look, he didn't want to be a third party candidate. He wanted to be the Democratic nominee and indeed did seek the Democratic Party nomination against Joe Biden at an early stage and then is only now running as an independent.
I suppose perhaps he might say that. Nevertheless, and even if the numbers are beginning to tail off in terms of other third party candidates, he is doing quite well. The numbers are higher than they've been for a third party candidate. Just briefly explain to our listeners how badly third party candidates normally do and how far you have to go back to previous third party candidates who got the kind of numbers, in some cases even better, that RFK Jr. is racking up now.
Well, no third party candidate has won the American presidency in modern times or at all. And you have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt, who had been president, but after leaving the presidency, came back, could not win the nomination, the presidential nomination of his Republican Party. It went to President Taft and basically forced a three way race with him, Taft and Woodrow Wilson. But he took enough votes to elect the Democrat and spoiled the race for his fellow Republican, Howard Taft. Since then, no one else has come close to really having that sort of leverage in a race.
Robert Kennedy now came into the race and was in the high 15 to 20 percent range originally. He's now closer in most polls to 10 percent. This puts him far ahead of other third party candidates of recent years. You know, it is a sizable number of votes.
And I suppose the different feature of this year compared to other years is the sheer number of voters who say they are really unhappy with the choice presented to them by the two main parties. There was this poll last week from The New York Times, their Sienna poll, suggesting that half of the people mulling a vote for RFK are doing it not because of enthusiasm for him, but because they just don't want to vote for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It's a kind of none of the above vote. And that particularly can wound Joe Biden because of the numbers when you drill a bit deeper, which is that he's polling quite strongly in groups that are crucially important for Democrats and for Joe Biden, that is, voters under 30, some 18 percent of younger voters favoring RFK, Jr., and also among Latinos, racking up 14 percent with them. I know it's notoriously difficult polling third party candidates, but it does make you think that you can see why Democrats are getting edgy about this.
What are Democrats, what are the Biden campaign doing to head off this threat, potentially to some of their most crucial voting groups?
Well, unlike the UK, where you have election campaigns of six weeks, maybe less, which we in America envy you for, ours go on for months, actually years. And so we're still months out from the election. And it is relatively true that as you get closer to election day, people thinking about voting in an unconventional manner, that all tends to drop. Doesn't mean it won't happen, but, you know, voters come home, they come back to the party they traditionally have been affiliated with. So I do think there is a lot of room for the Democrats to try to address those constituencies with young people.
Of course, the war in Gaza has been a big issue here. At the same time, they are punching back hard on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. There is a unit in the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party, that is doing nothing except addressing issues regarding third party candidates. There are, as you mentioned, a few others out there, but I think their focus primarily is on Robert Kennedy, Jr.
at the moment. So they are taking this seriously and they are taking steps to address what they think might be a problem for them.
Yeah. And they, as you mentioned, other candidates, Jill Stein, for the wants to be the Green Party candidate again, and Cornel West, a kind of celebrity academic, black American, could have make inroads with the young, could have make inroads with black voters. Plenty of headaches for the Democrats. But, as you were saying earlier on, Donald Trump, too, is beginning to feel a bit of the RFK heat.
I'd even take Biden over Jr. because our country would last about a year or two longer than it would with. Jr. would collapse almost immediately. And his family, a radical left, a crazy left, a bunch of lunatics would take over and our country will die very quickly.
So RFK's views on vaccines are fake, as is everything else about his candidacy.
Recently, really laying into him, what do you think is going to be Trump's strategy for handling RFK?
Well, it's a reflection to me that Trump and his team realize that where Robert Kennedy seems to be gaining a lot of traction, whether or not it's shown in the polls, at least in the political culture, is what you might call the manosphere. You know, these sort of podcasts from people like Joe Rogan, who don't like Biden. Russell Brand has been a fan of Robert F. Kennedy, which shows you kind of the space he's inhabiting within the political culture. And what does Trump do?
when Trump sees a threat? He tries to demonize it, diminish it. And so he's been out there saying Robert Kennedy is a far lefty, radical. Trump, he has a pretty good sense of picking out where threats may exist towards him. So the fact that he's doing this does lead me to believe that he sees Kennedy as a potential threat.
He wouldn't bother with him otherwise. And if he thought he was definitely hurting Biden, he would just let that fire rage without getting involved in it.
Yeah, I think that's right. I always think that Trump has a kind of reptilian intelligence. It's almost. it's not. it doesn't go via the brain.
It's in located in some other place. And as if RFK himself was not enough of a target for his opponents and, you know, and for journalists, just an extraordinary thing. We've got to say a word about his running mate. He's already said who his vice president.
Do we? do we really have to say anything about her?
Just say a word about Nicole Shanahan.
It's unbelievable, but we live in a time of unbelievable politics. Donald Trump showed us that years ago. Robert Kennedy, Jr., who wants us to take him seriously, his most important decision that he could make as a political candidate was his running mate. And he picked a woman, Nicole Shanahan, who is most famous for being the divorced wife of one of the Google founders and apparently got a billion dollars or so in the divorce settlement. I'm so proud to introduce to you the next vice president of the United States, my fellow lawyer, a brilliant scientist, technologist, a fierce warrior mom, Nicole Shanahan.
Yes, she was a patent lawyer for a while, though she stopped doing that. She runs some sort of foundation that is, against IVF, in vitro fertilization. She wants to find ways to prolong the fertility of women. That's fine. Good enough.
But she has no governmental experience. She has no experience leading a major organization, let alone a government structure. Her policies, we don't know what they are often. But, as I alluded to earlier, she does have one very, very, very big asset, and that is a billion dollars. And she has pumped millions of dollars, both before and after Robert Kennedy picked her as his running mate, into his campaign.
There are stories about her that have come out recently that show she's had a very erratic, professional and personal life. The Wall Street Journal has turned tabloid dishing on Tesla CEO Elon Musk's alleged affair with the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. So the Journal says the affair led to a divorce between Brin and his wife, Nicole Shanahan, and also a rupture in Musk and Brin's friendship.
Now, Musk has denied the allegation, saying this is total BS.
And she's been very active on social media of late, taking down all the pictures of her, showing her spending lots of money, being at fancy Silicon Valley parties and living the life of a tech industry celebrity. The fact that Kennedy picked her should, in a way, disqualify him. She's been under the radar. She doesn't give many press interviews. She's given one or two speeches in the month or so.
that since she's been picked. As much as a problem as it would be having him in the White House, it'd be also a problem having her there.
Yeah, I mean, you get a flavor of it if you look at The New York Times profile of her headline, a running mate's history, one billion dollars, cocaine, a fling with Elon Musk. David, there is so much more we could say about this, and I have a feeling we're going to be covering this and staying with it all through the rest of 2024.. But we like to ask our guests a what else question before we let them go. And in this case, Nikki Haley, who preoccupied a lot of our time journalistically in December, January and into February. She was running very trenchantly in the final weeks against Donald Trump.
After all that, she has come out and said she will vote for Donald Trump in November.
Trump has not been perfect on these policies.
I've made that clear many, many times.
But Biden has been a catastrophe.
So I will be voting for Trump. in a words, David, why careerism?
There was a Democratic congressman years ago, a guy named Representative Mo Udall, who said, once you have the presidential bug, there is only one way to get rid of it. And that's embalming fluid. So she wants to run again, presumably, if Trump wins or loses, he won't be running for years to now. That is, if we still have a democracy here. And she does not want to alienate the Republican Party.
It shows you the moral hollowness of the party. She ran against Trump saying he was unhinged and we should not have an unhinged person in the White House. Well, now she is in favor of putting an unhinged person in the White House. And that's because, you know, she doesn't want the party to turn on her if she comes out against Donald Trump. So.
For her own opportunistic reasons, she's bending the knee to Donald Trump, who called her a bird brain, and going along with the cult of Trump so that she can still be a viable candidate four years from now.
Yeah, I think that is probably the size of it. David Corn of Mother Jones, thanks so much for joining me on Politics Weekly America.
It's been great.
And that is all from me for this week, a few other things for you to listen to. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak surprised everyone and annoyed many in his own party by announcing there would be a general election on America's Independence Day, the 4th of July. To find out what to expect over the next six weeks, do listen to the latest episodes of our sister podcasts, Politics Weekly, UK and Today In Focus. Just search for them wherever you get your podcasts. But for now, it's goodbye.
The producer is Danielle Stevens and the executive producer is Maz Ebtehaj. I'm Jonathan Friedland. Thanks, as always, for listening.
This is The Guardian.
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