Robert Kennedy Jr., the unconventional Democrat siphoning double-digit Democratic support away from President Biden ahead of the 2024 election, won’t rule out building a wall along the southern border if it means stopping the flow of illegal immigrants that have poured into the U.S. on Mr. Biden’s watch.
And unlike Mr. Biden and much of the Democratic Party, Mr. Kennedy doesn’t believe in the government forcing an end to fossil fuels or banning 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,” but 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“I think there are a lot of Americans who believe the Republican and Democratic Parties no longer represent their aspirations and visions and interests,” Mr.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 primary, irritating party leaders who are already grappling with Mr. Biden’s historically weak poll numbers.
Mr. Biden announced his re-election bid last month amid sagging support from voters. A new poll found former President Donald Trump, the leading GOP primary candidate, winning by 6 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.
While Mr. Kennedy has spent much of his career as an environmental lawyer, he has emerged as one of the nation’s most vocal vaccine critics and has questioned the safety and side effects associated with some shots.
His audience grew in the pandemic era after he publicly railed against the COVID shots and mandates forcing people to get them despite reports of significant side effects and even deaths.
His views 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 advisor, 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.
The 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 when it comes to the environment, once arguing 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 back a government-forced end to fossil fuels embraced by his party.
Instead, he envisions renewables taking over the power grid after the federal government ends subsidies to all of the nation’s energy producers so that the free market determines the survival of natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind and solar.
“It’s gonna 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 predicted.
In another sharp break from the Democratic Party, Mr. Kennedy said he is solidly pro-Second Amendment and doesn’t support proposals to ban guns, arguing it won’t solve the epidemic of deadly shootings.
Instead, doctors should stop over-prescribing psychiatric drugs to the nation’s youth, 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, Mr. Kennedy said, by employing policies promoting health and building immunity to end chronic diseases that are causing an unsustainable drain on federal healthcare entitlements.
“I’m gonna end the chronic disease epidemic which is right now 80% of our medical dollars,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Mr. Kennedy, while promoting civil liberties in a manner that aligns him more with former President Donald Trump than Mr. Biden, has embraced some of the most far-left views of the Democratic Party.
He was a friend and admirer of Cuba’s late communist dictator, Fidel Castro, and said the island nation’s embrace of communism has been beneficial.
Like Fidel Castro, he does not believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy made headlines this month by suggesting the CIA played a role in the assassination. He called for the release of government files on the killing that are still shrouded in secrecy.
“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’ll hit the road soon to begin campaigning in the Democratic primary’s early voting states. He’ll 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 any 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 reduce 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 illegal immigrants to stream into the U.S.
It’s become a top concern among voters and is one of the issues that has become most politically damaging for Mr. Biden.
A recent Global Strategies Group poll found 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 will have to 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.