Robert F Kennedy Jr

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      in US Politics

      Muted mics, no props: CNN details rules for Biden and Trump debate

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      The first US presidential debate between incumbent Joe Biden and Republican rival Donald Trump on 27 June will include two commercial breaks, no props and muted microphones except when recognized to speak, CNN said Saturday.The rules, agreed outside the Commission on Presidential Debates, are designed to reduce fractious interruptions and cross-talk that have often marred TV encounters in recent presidential election cycles.CNN, a division of Warner Bros Discovery, said debate moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion” during the 90-minute broadcast from Atlanta.Another Biden-Trump face-off will be hosted by ABC anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis in September. The traditional October debate will not take place as part of the agreement between the two campaigns and television networks that cut out the commission following years of complaints and perceived slights.CNN said both candidates will appear at a uniform podium during the 90-minute debate, podium positions will be determined by a coin flip and candidates will be given a pen, a pad of paper and a bottle of water but cannot use props.“Microphones will be muted throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak,” CNN said.The network also said that during the two commercial breaks, campaign staff will not be permitted to interact with their candidate, and unlike previous debates there will be no studio audience.Biden and Trump, the two oldest candidates ever to run for US president, will be seeking the support of an uncommonly large swathe of undecided voters who may only begin to pay close attention to the contest closer to the 5 November election day.But with polls already narrowing in crucial swing states, the debates come with risks for both candidates with markedly different styles of governance – on a seasoned senator who relies on an extensive staff for policy positions, and a New York developer-turned-reality TV star who shoots from the hip.According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll earlier this month, Biden is losing support among voters without college degrees, a large group that includes Black people, Hispanic women, young voters and suburban women.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe essence of the argument – Biden accuses his predecessor of being unhinged and a danger to democracy, while Trump accuses Biden of being senile and corrupt – has so far left many voters cool to the prospect of a 2024 rematch between two political candidates who, at 81 and 78, are twice the US median age.According to a campaign memo viewed by Reuters, Biden has three preferred debate topics: abortion rights, the state of democracy and the economy. Trump’s team has indicated that immigration, public safety and inflation are his key issues.The hosting networks will be keen to ensure that the twin debates will run more smoothly than in 2020, when the discussion focused on Trump’s pandemic response and moderator Chris Wallace had to step in to remind the candidates he was asking the questions.The second scheduled debate set for October did not take place due to Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis and his refusal to appear remotely rather than in person. In this election cycle, both candidates have refused to refused to debate rivals for their party’s nomination.CNN said that candidates eligible to participate must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win and receive at least 15% in four separate national polls.It said it was “not impossible” that independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, could still qualify, saying he has received at least 15% in three qualifying polls to date and has qualified for the ballot in six states, making him eligible for 89 electoral college votes.The Kennedy campaign said Saturday that its polling showed he was now in second place alongside Biden in Utah, but behind Trump, and that he outpaces Biden and Trump among independents nationally.Reuters contributed to this story More

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      in US Politics

      Could RFK swing enough votes from Trump and Biden to decide the election?

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      View image in fullscreenThe Kennedy name looms large over American politics. John F Kennedy, despite serving only twoand a half years as president before his assassination, is frequently ranked among the top 10 US leaders; his brother, Robert F Kennedy, seemed set for his own spell in the White House until he too was killed in 1968.Enter: Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of the former, son of the latter and increasingly, persona non grata of the surviving Kennedy clan.Part-time environmental lawyer, full-time conspiracy theorist, an animal enthusiast who owned a pet lion at his elite boarding school and who, in his telling, had part of his brain eaten by a worm, Kennedy entered the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat running against Biden, before switching to an independent in October last year. The 70-year-old, who also has a history of associating with white supremacists, is an unknown quantity in the 2024 election race, with both parties worried about the havoc he could wreak.Five months out from perhaps the most consequential election in recent US history, Biden and Trump continue to be unpopular with the American public. Kennedy’s ability to be neither of those men, and his willingness to lean into his family name, have positioned him as a spanner in the works of American democracy.Both Democrats and Republicans fear that Kennedy, who is polling at about 10% nationally, could pull votes away from their men. Even a few Biden or Trump voters hopping on to the Kennedy train could be enough to influence what is expected to be a tight race. In an indication of the threat he poses, Trump has gone from praising Kennedy as a “very smart person” a year ago to recently posting a four-minute video attacking him on Truth Social.Plenty of people try to be president. In 2020 alone, 1,212 people filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission saying they were running for the White House. Yet it is Kennedy who is drawing all the coverage.Would he be getting as much attention – and pulling in millions of dollars in donations, some of it from former Trump supporters – if he had a different last name? Probably not.The world was introduced to RFK Jr early. His father, a supporter of Israel, was killed by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man, as Kennedy Sr campaigned for president in Los Angeles. A 14-year-old Kennedy Jr was a pallbearer at his funeral: black and white photos from the funeral show a shaggy-haired Kennedy at the head of the coffin, looking numb and out of place among a crowd of grown men.Kennedy was the third of 11 children (the Kennedys were prodigious breeders), born to his father and Ethel Kennedy – a Chicago-born daughter of a coal magnate who remained a public presence way into the 1990s. Ethel made an appearance on the sitcom Cheers and was even named a tough tennis opponent in a Seinfeld episode.If Kennedy benefited from the family name, he benefited from the family wealth, too. Kennedy was raised in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, at the Kennedy compound – where his mother lives to this day.He studied at Millbrook school, a private boarding school in New York. At Millbrook, Kennedy was not universally liked, Jerry Oppenheimer wrote in a biography of the future presidential candidate.“[Kennedy] was viewed by some fellow students as egotistical and irresponsible for strutting around the campus and on the sidelines at home football games with a potentially dangerous young lion on a leash,” Oppenheimer wrote.Millbrook’s headmaster eventually banished the lion, who was called Toto, from campus, and the then 130lb big cat went to live at a safari park in Florida.Other interests, Oppenheimer reported, included “getting stoned” and, oddly, falconry. Kennedy was in a gang too: the Hyannis Port Terrors, who apparently “ran around and stole alcohol” during the summer months.(Kennedy’s parading around with a lion had apparently been forgiven by 1998: that year, he was the commencement speaker at the school.)His teenage years were difficult. In an interview in 2023, Kennedy said he started taking heroin when he was 15 years old, saying he “had a big empty hole inside”, and in 1983, when he was 29, Kennedy was charged with heroin possession after he “became ill”, the New York Times reported, “in the washroom of an airliner” which stopped in Rapid City, South Dakota.“All of a sudden everybody knew I was a drug addict and it gave me the freedom to get help,” Kennedy told an interviewer. “I could just be who I was and be honest.”Kennedy had hidden his addiction while graduating from Harvard University and earning a law degree from Pace University in New York, and after he had completed two years’ probation as a result of the heroin charge, he embarked on a career in environmental law.He worked for Riverkeeper, an organization which protects New York’s Hudson River, and sued polluters in an effort to protect waterways; his work earned him a place on the front cover of New York Magazine in 1995, which described him as “The Kennedy who matters”.But Kennedy – who during his campaign has criticized Biden for overspending on environmental issues – would become better known in the US as a conspiracy theorist.Kennedy spent years claiming, loudly and wrongly, that vaccines cause autism, while in 2023 alone Kennedy stated that wifi causes “leaky brain”, linked antidepressants to school shootings and said that chemicals in water were making children transgender.His history of embracing conspiracy theories meant Covid-19 was a perfect storm for Kennedy. His already-existing anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense became “an influential force that spreads false and misleading information”, Associated Press reported, with the group publishing books that falsely claim the Covid-19 vaccine caused a spike in deaths. A report in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2022 named Kennedy’s Twitter account as “the top superspreader” of misinformation about Covid-19.Kennedy was particularly criticized for a speech he gave at a rally against mandatory Covid vaccines in Washington in January 2022. Standing at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Kennedy told an animated crowd that unnamed figures were trying to control the American population in a way never seen before.“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said.“Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.”The remarks caused uproar, not least from the Auschwitz museum, which tweeted: “Exploiting of the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany – including children like Anne Frank – in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.”Kennedy later apologized for saying that people who wished to remain unvaccinated had fewer freedoms than Anne Frank. But he continued to dabble in Covid-19 misinformation, writing in a 2021 book that Anthony Fauci, the top US public health expert during the pandemic, had conspired with Bill Gates to suppress alternative medicine treatments for Covid-19.View image in fullscreenGiven his history, Kennedy’s declaration, as he announced his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in April 2023, that he was “not an ideal presidential candidate for normal times”, could seem like an understatement. But people barely had a chance to get to grips with his candidacy before, in October, he scrapped the idea of running as a Democrat, and announced an independent campaign, this time claiming that the “two-party establishment” was “leading us all over a cliff”.As an independent choice, Kennedy represents a still quite old, but not as old as Biden or Trump, candidate. He would be 71 by the time he took office, but Kennedy presents as younger than his two rivals: less jowly, more robust and with a more convincing head of hair. At a campaign stop in June 2023, he stripped to the waist to lift some weights at a gym in Los Angeles, revealing a fairly impressive physique.On the campaign trial, Kennedy looks the part: that thick silver hair, those big white teeth, that perma-tan. His voice, then, comes as a surprise. Kennedy has a strained, halting tone, owing to spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition which affects his voice.That condition is far from Kennedy’s only brush with ill health. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on a deposition Kennedy had given during his divorce from his second wife, Mary Kathleen Richardson Kennedy. In the deposition, given in 2012, Kennedy said he had experienced memory loss, which “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”.“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” Kennedy said. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”After the Times article was published, Kennedy tweeted that he was willing “​​to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate”.Richardson Kennedy died by suicide in 2012, leaving behind her four children with Kennedy. Before Richardson Kennedy, Kennedy had two children with his first wife, Emily Black, one of whom is called Robert F Kennedy III. In 2014, Kennedy married Cheryl Hines, an actor best known for playing Larry David’s wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The pair live in Los Angeles.Hines, 58, has sought to distance herself from her husband’s campaign. She said in an interview with Fox News earlier this year that she did not always agree with Kennedy’s politics: “We’ve learned to talk through it. Talk it out. Listen to each other. Sometimes, agree to disagree or say: ‘Oh, I’m going to think about that and I hear what you’re saying,’ or: ‘I don’t like the way you’re saying it. I wish you’d say it in a different way.’”The fear for Biden and Trump is that Kennedy could be a Ralph Nader figure. Nader ran as the Green party candidate in the 2000 presidential election, and some Democrats still believe that it was his performance in Florida that swung the election away from Al Gore and towards George W Bush.Early predictions suggested Kennedy – as a scion of the most famous Democratic family in history – would draw support from Biden. Trump and other Republicans certainly seemed to think so, and spent months extolling his virtues – there was even suggestions among rightwing media that Kennedy could be a good vice-president to Trump.But conservatives might come to regret pumping him up. Polls have shown that Trump supporters are more drawn to Kennedy – with his vaccine skepticism and hardline policies on the border particularly popular – than Biden.Republican donors have flocked to Kennedy, too. Timothy Mellon, a Wyoming-based billionaire who has previously donated to groups supporting Trump, has given $25m to the Kennedy campaign, while Rolling Stone reported that other donors include regular Republican donors like John Schnatter, the disgraced former CEO of Papa John’s Pizza, and a financier who briefly supported Ron DeSantis’s bid for the Republican nomination.The support is enough for Kennedy to potentially make a nuisance of himself in terms of pulling votes away from Biden or Trump. But that doesn’t mean Kennedy is popular.Like Biden and Trump, more people dislike Kennedy than like him. According to FiveThirtyEight, 42% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Kennedy, with just 35% seeing him favorably: a favorability rating of -7%. (Trump has a favorability of -12%, Biden -16%.)He’s a bit less unpopular than his two main opponents, then, which can only be a good thing. But Kennedy has already shown himself to be a problematic figure on the campaign trail.Last July, he caused controversy when a video recording showed him falsely claiming that the Covid-19 virus had been “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people had greater immunity.Members of the Kennedy family roundly criticized the candidate after his remarks were made public: Jack Schlossberg, a grandson of President Kennedy, called his cousin’s campaign “an embarrassment” in a video.Other family members have made it clear that they oppose their namesake’s candidacy. In April, more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family, including six of Kennedy’s siblings, endorsed Biden for president.That should be galling for Kennedy, who on the campaign trail repeatedly mentions his family history. His Kennedy 2024 website frequently references his uncle, who despite his short term ranked as the ninth best president in a 2022 Siena College poll of historians, and 10th in a similar survey of 154 historians and presidential experts this year. (Biden was placed 14th, Trump came last.)Kennedy’s uncle president may even have influenced his decision to run as an independent. In a speech in Maryland in 1958, when he was still a senator and was two years away from becoming the 35th president of the US, John F Kennedy said:“Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past: let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”Kennedy is hoping that Americans will agree with that quote – or at least the bit about not seeking Republican or Democratic answers – come November. More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr files election complaint over CNN debate rules

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      The independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr filed an election complaint on Wednesday alleging CNN is colluding with Joe Biden and the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, to exclude him from a debate the network is hosting next month.Kennedy alleges the requirements to participate in the 27 June debate were designed to ensure only Biden and Trump would qualify and Kennedy claims he is being held to a higher standard.“CNN is making prohibited corporate contributions to both campaigns and the Biden committee and the Trump committee have accepted these prohibited corporate contributions,” a lawyer for Kennedy, Lorenzo Holloway, wrote in a letter to the Federal Election Commission.CNN said the complaint was without merit.Biden and Trump agreed this month to the CNN debate and a second on 10 September hosted by ABC, bypassing the non-partisan commission that has organized debates for nearly four decades. The first debate will come before Biden and Trump have been formally nominated by their parties this summer.Kennedy has looked to the debates as a singular opportunity to stand alongside Biden and Trump, lending legitimacy to his long-shot bid, and to convince people inclined to support him that he has a shot at winning. Both the Biden and Trump campaigns fear he could play spoiler.Kennedy still has time to meet the requirements, though the window is narrowing.CNN has said candidates will be invited if they have secured a place on the ballot in states totaling at least 270 votes in the electoral college, the minimum needed to win the presidency, and have reached 15% in four reliable polls by 20 June.Kennedy’s campaign says he has submitted signatures or other paperwork to appear on the ballot in nine states – California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah – with a combined 171 electoral votes, though not all have affirmed his name will be listed. California, the largest prize on the electoral map with 54 votes, will not certify any candidates until 29 August.“The law in virtually every state provides that the nominee of a state-recognized political party will be allowed ballot access without petitioning,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday. “As the presumptive nominees of their parties both Biden and Trump will satisfy this requirement. As an independent candidate, under applicable laws RFK Jr does not. The mere application for ballot access does not guarantee that he will appear on the ballot in any state.”Kennedy also has not met the polling criteria, the statement said.Biden and Trump have easily cleared the polling threshold but will not be certified for the ballot until their parties formally nominate them. Both have secured enough delegates to lock in their nominations. More

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      Libertarians nominate Chase Oliver for president, rejecting Trump and RFK Jr

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      The US Libertarian party has nominated Chase Oliver as its presidential candidate after members rejected overtures from Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr.Oliver, 38, who describes himself as “armed and gay”, was chosen at the party’s convention in Washington DC on Sunday at the end of seven rounds of voting that lasted seven hours.Accepting the nomination, he vowed to be “the only national candidate” – contrasting himself to Trump, Kennedy and President Joe Biden – in the presidential poll and called for a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, saying “end the genocide”.Oliver’s victory followed separate pitches to the Libertarian convention – staged against the backdrop slogan of “Become Ungovernable” – by Trump and Kennedy for the backing of a party that could win a significant enough proportion of the popular vote to swing what is expected to be a close election.Trump has been running narrowly ahead of Biden in most nationwide polls, while Kennedy – with the advantage of name recognition through being a member of America’s most storied political family dynasty – has been consistently running at around or above 10%, making him a potential spoiler candidate.With the party platform dedicated to individual freedom and small government, members booed and jeered Trump on Saturday when he addressed them in a bid to win their support.“We should not be fighting each other,” Trump – the former president and presumed Republican nominee – told the gathering, only to be greeted with a chorus of profane catcalls. “Combine with us in a partnership – we’re asking that of the libertarians. We must work together. Combine with us. You have to combine with us.”Kennedy, the son of the former attorney general Robert F Kennedy and running as an independent after initially trying to win the Democratic nomination, earned a warmer reception after pledging to pardon Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower now exiled in Russia, and drop espionage charges against Julian Assange.But he was eliminated in the first round of Sunday’s voting after winning just 19 votes, 2% of the total. Trump, who was not an official potential nominee, won six write-in votes.In his acceptance speech, Oliver took aim at both candidates, as well as Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Rule No 1: If you want to elect a real political outsider, don’t elect somebody with the last name Kennedy,” he said.Referring to the advanced years of Trump and Biden, aged 77 and 81 respectively, he said younger voters “don’t want octogenarians running their lives”.The party, which expects to be on the ballot in at least 37 states, won 1.2% of the popular vote in the 2020 election. More

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      RFK Jr attacks Trump and Biden as he makes 2024 pitch to Libertarian voters

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      Robert Kennedy Jr, a longshot independent candidate for US president, has sought to woo Libertarian party voters by casting rivals Donald Trump and Joe Biden as enemies of individual freedom.Kennedy, 70, brought Libertarians to their feet by promising to pardon government whistleblower Edward Snowden, currently exiled in Russia, and drop espionage charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder battling US attempts to extradite him from Britain.Founded in 1971, the Libertarian party is committed to limiting the size and scope of government, and gained 1.2% of the national vote in the 2020 presidential election. But with this year’s race looking tight, Kennedy, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and environmental advocate, and Trump, the Republican nominee, are chasing votes at its its convention in Washington.Early in a 45-minute speech, Kennedy made light of the recent revelation that he had a brainworm more than a decade ago. Accusing past leaders of repeatedly encroaching on personal liberties, up to and including the coronavirus pandemic, he said to applause: “Maybe a brainworm ate that part of memory, but I don’t recall any part of the United States constitution where there is an exemption for pandemics.”Addressing a few hundred delegates, Kennedy accused Trump of allowing the government to abuse individual liberty during the pandemic. He said: “I think he had the right instinct when he came into office. He was initially very reluctant to impose lockdowns, but then he got rolled by his bureaucrats. He caved in and many of our most fundamental rights disappeared practically overnight.”Kennedy earned further applause when he asserted: “All of our constitutional rights were ploughed under. They closed all the churches but they kept open the Walmarts and the liquor stores.”He accused Trump of closing down 3.3m businesses. “President Trump said he was going to run America like a business, and he came in and he gave the keys to all of our businesses to a 50-year bureaucrat who’d never been elected to anything and had no accountability,” he said.Kennedy touched a nerve in his audience when he turned to the espionage charges against Assange, who this week won the right to bring a fresh appeal against his extradition, and National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Snowden. Each line was greeted with cheers and applause as he spoke.View image in fullscreen“President Trump also assaulted the first amendment and failed to defend press freedom when he continued President [Barack] Obama’s persecution and prosecution of Julian Assange,” he said. “Assange should be celebrated as a hero. He did exactly what journalists are supposed to do, which is to expose government corruption. We shouldn’t put him in prison; we should have a monument to him here in Washington DC.“The same is true of Edward Snowden … He’s a hero, not a criminal, and I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to do what President Trump should have done. On my first day in office, I’m going to pardon Edward Snowden and I’m going to drop charges – all charges – against Julian Assange.”The room erupted in roars of approval.Kennedy argued that he deserves a place on the debate stage with Biden and Trump, who have so far agreed to two TV debates without him. Opinion polls suggest that he could siphon votes from both men, with a May Reuters/ Ipsos survey showing he was supported by 13% of respondents.He went to take aim at the current president, too. “When President Trump left office, the assault on the constitution intensified. President Biden violated a freedom so fundamental that James Madison didn’t even think to put it in the Bill of Rights.”Kennedy accused Biden of “a programme of coercion and information control” during the pandemic, repeating unfounded claims that Biden colluded with the FBI to coerce social media sites to allow government agencies to carry out “an obscene orgy of federal censorship”. He said it went from “medical misinformation” to “an entire censorship industrial complex” that also suppresses critics of the war in Ukraine.Coronavirus vaccines were deemed safe and effective by the US government and its regulatory agencies as well as the World Health Organization. The first two years of Covid vaccines saved an estimated 3m lives in the US alone, according to a study published by the Commonwealth Fund.Kennedy has been criticised for making false medical claims over the years about vaccines. The son of Senator Robert F Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 during his own presidential bid, Kennedy has drawn rebukes from his famous family, who have publicly backed Biden. At his event on Friday, badges reminiscent of John F Kennedy’s 1960s campaign were placed on the seats.Kennedy, who chose wealthy lawyer Nicole Shanahan as his running mate, and who is officially on the ballot in seven states so far, supports Israel and has questioned a six-week ceasefire backed by Biden. On Friday, one delegate shouted: “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” Kennedy replied: “Happy to talk afterwards.”View image in fullscreenThe candidate went on to pledge: “Murder is not OK anywhere in any form. That is why I will end the forever wars. The wars that have bankrupted our nation and ruined our reputation abroad.” There were cheers and shouts of “Yes!”Overall, Kennedy’s reception at the convention was warm, throwing down the gauntlet to Trump, who is due to speak on Saturday evening.Dan Belforti, a Libertarian party member wearing a “Kennedy 2024” T-shirt, said: “He’s libertarian enough. He’s actually better on the environment than the Libertarian party platform is. A true free market would price in the externalities of pollution but the Libertarian party doesn’t necessarily put that in their platform yet.”Belforti, 60, a retired financial adviser and former congressional candidate and radio host, also praised Kennedy’s vaccine scepticism. “He’s right. Well researched. It’s amazing to me how the the American press at least has demonised him as some kind of anti-vax extremist when in reality he’s a very sensible, reasonable, rational man, so it just goes to show you how powerful the pharmaceutical lobby is.”But Belforti, who lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, parts company with Kennedy on Gaza: “I don’t understand why he is supportive of Israel’s response to the terrorist attack. Around the world people would understand that you want to enact some kind of justice but I think what’s going on is so far overboard that I can’t support that policy. That’s the one issue I think Bobby Kennedy might be weakest on in this room.”Pendleton Spicer, 79, a musician and county elections official from Tucson, Arizona, has no intention of voting for Kennedy. “He just doesn’t represent my beliefs. I feel like he’s bought into the narrative about how horrible climate change is. I disagree with the narrative.”But she added: “I like his position on medical stuff – there’s plenty of science to say that the vaccines are dangerous – as long as he holds the position that we have freedom over our bodies, freedom of choice about what goes into our bodies.”Adrian Malagon, chair of the Libertarian party in California, said: “He’s a very interesting man. He’s great on medical freedom. There’s some things that he’s fantastic on. He doesn’t hold all libertarian positions but he is a fascinating man. I’ve had the privilege of meeting him, speaking with him and I very much like him.”Kennedy’s appearance was protested by progressive group MoveOn, which circulated a mobile billboard around the Libertarian National Convention in a push to argue that a vote for Kennedy is effectively a vote for Trump.Joel Payne, MoveOn’s political action chief communications officer, said: “As if we needed any more evidence, Kennedy Jr made it clear today that he should be nowhere near the Oval Office. It’s no surprise that Kennedy Jr and Trump are on the same stage this weekend. They already share the same views on restricting abortion access and spreading dangerous conspiracy theories.” More

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      Who does RFK Jr pose the bigger threat to: Joe Biden or Donald Trump? – podcast

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      Last week it was announced that Donald Trump and Joe Biden would finally hit the debate stage for a rematch. While voters contemplate which of the pair stands to lose more by going head to head, another candidate is working hard to try to join them – Robert F Kennedy Jr. The controversial independent candidate doesn’t even have the backing of his famous political family, but he’s polling nationally stronger than any third-party candidate has in decades.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to political analyst David Corn about which of the two frontrunners should be more worried by RFK Jr’s presidential campaign

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Kerry Kennedy on the family political split: ‘There’s so much at stake’

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      Every Christmas Kerry Kennedy makes a book for her numerous relatives. “It has at least one photograph of every single member of my extremely enormous family,” she says. “And yes, Bobby is in the book.”“Bobby” refers to her brother, Robert Kennedy Jr, a hopeful sign that the sibling bond will survive an oncoming storm. Robert is running as an independent candidate for US president in November’s election. Kerry is one of at least 15 members of the Kennedy clan who recently endorsed Joe Biden instead.Robert’s long history of promoting vaccine conspiracy theories, and associating with racists and antisemites, has been a source of anguish for what was once seen as America’s equivalent of a royal family. They have been at pains to distance themselves from the 70-year-old’s dangerously fringe, anti-scientific views.Last year Jack Schlossberg, the sole grandson of former president John F Kennedy, denounced Robert for “trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame” and described the candidacy as an “embarrassment”.With Robert polling at about 10% with potential to have an impact in crucial swing states, the Kennedy family has closed ranks around Biden, who keeps a bust of one-time presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Sr in the Oval Office. Last month they joined the president at a campaign stop in Philadelphia to publicly back him against Donald Trump, whom they cast as a dire threat to American democracy.Robert responded on social media that his family was “divided in our opinions but united in our love for each other”.View image in fullscreenKerry, 64, the seventh of Ethel and Robert Kennedy Sr’s 11 children, recalls in an interview that the collective decision involved “a lot of texts and emails and phone calls and ‘let’s do that’”.Several notable members of the dynasty did not endorse, including Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Australia, and the non-profit leader Maria Shriver, which the Biden campaign said was due to their non-political professional roles. Kerry adds: “Then there’s my brother Bobby and one cousin but 100% of everybody else endorsed Joe Biden.”How did it feel to go against her own brother? After a pause, the human rights activist and lawyer says by phone from the family home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts: “I feel like there’s so much at stake. When Daddy ran for president, in part of his speech he said, ‘I cannot stand aside,’ and that’s how I feel. I just feel there’s so much at stake.“I’ve spent the last 40 years working on civil rights domestically and international human rights and trying to hold governments accountable for abusing people, particularly members of the press, and I can’t let this go. We cannot have Trump in for four more years. And Biden is great. He has accomplished so much more as president, which is wild considering the Congress that he’s had to work with.”She points to historic legislation that Biden signed to tackle the climate crisis and slash child poverty, and to an economy that has made a better post-pandemic recovery than China, Europe or any other major competitor.View image in fullscreen“Most Americans are doing a lot better than they were and Trump would be a disaster for us. I felt, and my siblings and my cousins all felt, that what’s at stake here is our democracy, our freedom. our fight for the middle class and all that means that Joe Biden must be re-elected.”Robert, an environmental lawyer, has pushed bogus assertions about the dangers of vaccines, linked antidepressants to school shootings and claimed last year that the coronavirus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” (he later said his remarks were misinterpreted).But Kerry, president of the organisation Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, is reluctant to comment on her brother’s public statements or policy agenda, citing the impossibility of an independent candidate breaking Democrats and Republicans’ stranglehold on the electoral college.“I don’t think that matters because he can’t win,” she says matter-of-factly. “It’s irrelevant what he says about any given subject. It’s a nonentity. He can’t get 270 electoral votes. The only question is not where he stands on a particular issue but what’s his impact on the campaign, and that to me is dangerous because this election, just like every other presidential, is going to be razor thin and we can’t afford to lose one vote – not one.“We need every voter who’s thinking of voting for a third party to vote instead for Biden because otherwise it’s like you’re throwing a vote to Trump and that’s a disaster.”View image in fullscreenRobert, initially challenged Biden in the party primary election before running as an independent, could use his last name’s lingering Democratic mystique to siphon support from the president. A super political action committee supporting his campaign produced a TV advert during the Super Bowl that relied heavily on imagery from John F Kennedy’s 1960 presidential run. (Robert apologised if the commercial “caused anyone in my family pain”.)skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut there is some evidence that he might hurt Trump more. A Quinnipiac survey last month found that Robert drew support from 12% of voters who supported Trump in a two-way contest, compared with 7% from Biden voters. An NBC poll found that Robert attracted 15% of Trump supporters compared with 7% of those of who backed Biden.Kerry, formerly married to the Democrat Andrew Cuomo, an ex-governor of New York, responds: “That’s kind of irrelevant because I’m delighted for him to take every single vote he can from Trump but we want all those votes that would go to Biden to go to Biden because these margins are so close that we can’t afford to lose them to Bobby or anyone else.”Trump has been transparent about his ambitions for an imperial presidency. In a recent Time magazine interview, he said he was open to using the national guard to deport undocumented migrants and allowing states to monitor women’s pregnancies so they know if they receive an abortion.Kerry offers a nightmarish vision of what a second Trump term would look like. “He has said he’ll be dictator on day one, that he’ll suspend the constitution, that he will use the justice department to go after his enemies, that he will have a litmus test for the thousands of government workers on loyalty to Donald Trump and that loyalty test will be: was the election stolen or not? If you say the election was not stolen, you no longer have a government job.“It would be generational bias on courts, not just the supreme court but courts across the board. He’s said he will create massive labour camps and forced detention centres for immigrants and he would put not just the police but the armed forces in our streets in order to enforce that.“A Muslim ban on day one. It would be a disaster for global warming, as he’s indicated. It would be a disaster for women’s rights and women’s control over their bodies. You’d see more librarians going to prison for allowing books to be on bookshelves.”At age 43, Kerry’s uncle was the youngest person ever elected to the presidency. Her father, a former attorney general, was just 42 when he was assassinated while running for the White House in 1968. There could be no greater contrast with Biden, who at 81 is the oldest president in history. Kerry, who has spent time with him twice in the past two months, offers her assessment.View image in fullscreen“He physically does not have the grace of a 20-year-old but in terms of his mind, if you talk to him about any number of issues – and I’m not talking about what do you think about Gaza and the Middle East or Ukraine in general or poverty, I’m talking about what do you think about private prison systems that imprison Black youth in Louisiana? – he will talk to you about that.“And then he’ll tell you about three different bills by name. ‘Well, HR 2732 would address that but the Republicans don’t want it for this reason and they have a congressman in Alabama who’s against it for this reason but there’s a chance of changing it on these two paragraphs.’ I mean, it is unbelievable. That is a guy who knows what’s going on. That is my experience.”That is why, Kerry insists, voters must stay focused on the binary choice before them and not get distracted by third-party candidates: Jill Stein, Cornel West – and Robert Kennedy Jr. “I disagree with him on a range of the issues which I’ve discussed with him and been quite public about,” she says.“But the point here is not a sister and a brother or a family or anything like that. It is what’s the future of our country and what’s the future of our world and do we have a democracy in the United States and do we have a liberal world order or not? That’s what’s going on here. Who cares about two siblings? It’s absurd.” More

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      RFK Jr says he’ll eat brain worms and ‘still beat’ Biden and Trump in debate

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      In a US presidential campaign season growing more bizarre by the day, the independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr offered “to eat five more brain worms and still beat” Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a staged debate.Kennedy was speaking after the New York Times published a startling story about a 2012 deposition in which he said a previous neurological problem “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”.“I offer to eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate,” Kennedy posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.“I feel confident of the result even with a six-worm handicap.”In answer to an account parodying the billionaire Elon Musk, who said Kennedy should debate Trump and Biden “on X spaces with Tucker Carlson monitoring”, Kennedy said: “I’m in!”Kennedy and Trump are both due to speak at the Libertarian party convention in Washington later this month. Kennedy has challenged Trump to debate him there.Kennedy’s health problems were the subject of a lengthy Times report, which quoted from a deposition Kennedy gave during divorce proceedings in 2012.Some doctors thought Kennedy had a brain tumour but another said a dark spot on scans could be the result of a parasite. Experts said Kennedy could have suffered a pork tapeworm infection. The Times said Kennedy also reported suffering mercury poisoning, from eating too much infected fish.“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” Kennedy said in the deposition. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”Kennedy, 70, told the Times he had recovered. His campaign said: “The issue was resolved more than 10 years ago and he is in robust physical and mental health. Questioning Mr Kennedy’s health is a hilarious suggestion, given his competition.”Biden is 81, Trump 77. Public polling shows dissatisfaction with both. Observers from both sides of the divide fear Kennedy acting as a spoiler in the general election, as he continues to seek ballot access in all 50 states.Kennedy’s family has long sat in the mainstream of US politics. His father was the US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, while uncles included John F Kennedy, the 35th president, and Ted Kennedy, the longtime Massachusetts senator.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracy theories and other non-mainstream views have flourished online – where news of his views on brain worms caused predictable hilarity.“Robert F Kennedy Jr says health issue caused by dead worm in his brain,” wrote Craig Rozniecki, a satirist. “Well, that explains a lot …”The actor and comedian Patton Oswalt wrote: “‘The worm that ate part of my brain will not affect my ability to serve as president’ is the kind of dynamic campaign slogan that’s gonna seal the deal for ol’ Brainworm Bobby.”
      This article was amended on 9 May 2024 to clarify that Robert F Kennedy Jr was responding to an account parodying Elon Musk. A previous version incorrectly stated he was responding to Musk. More