Former President Donald Trump said that RFK Jr.’s campaign will ultimately serve to boost the MAGA candidate but slammed the independent presidential candidate’s progressive environmental policies.
“Kennedy is a Radical Left Democrat, and always will be!!! It’s great for MAGA, but the Communists will make it very hard for him to get on the Ballot. Expect him, and her, to be indicted any day now, probably for Environmental Fraud! He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine. I love that he is running!”
The Silicon Valley lawyer “shares my indignation about the participation of Big Tech as a partner in the censorship and their surveillance, and the information warfare that our government is currently waging against the American people,” Mr. Kennedy said.
“That’s why I’m bringing on someone with a deep inside knowledge of how big tech uses AI to manipulate the public. I wanted a partner with strong ideas about how to reverse those dire threats to democracy and our freedoms. I managed to find a technologist at the forefront of AI,” he added.
Last year, President Trump praised RFK Jr., calling him “a very smart guy and a good guy” in an interview with The Howie Carr Show. In response, Mr. Kennedy said he was “proud” President Trump liked him.
Environment-Focused Candidate
According to his campaign website, Mr. Kennedy, formerly an environmental lawyer, intends to focus on the environmental problems facing the United States in his run for president.“Recent years have seen one environmental disaster after another: floods and droughts, fires, and toxic spills. Our soils are depleted, the weather is wacky, trees are dying, and the water in many places is toxic … We’re going to address these problems at their root causes,” it said.
Mr. Kennedy promises to transition the American industry to “clean energy sources” and aims to push such policies throughout the global supply chain. The independent presidential candidate vowed to curb “mining, logging, [and] oil drilling” in a bid to protect “wild lands from further development.”
Mr. Kennedy promised to ensure that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) fulfill their “proper role of protecting health and the environment” once president.
“In recent years, climate change has made the environment a divisive issue, but there are many policies that make sense to skeptics and activists alike. We will emphasize those, and rebuild a broad environmental coalition to clean up this country.”
During a speech in March 2017, Mr. Kennedy said there was a “battle that we’re now engaged with in this country: a war between old energy and new energy,” according to a post by the State University of New York at New Paltz.
He called for stripping away subsidies given to “old energy” sources to ensure that energy industries operate more cleanly.
In 2017, he was one of the prominent figures who lent support to the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline that was backed by President Trump.
As part of his campaign promise, Mr. Kenney said in September that he would “ban fracking, which provides the feedstock for most of the plastics produced in the U.S.”
After the statement triggered a backlash, his campaign softened the stance, saying that Mr. Kennedy would seek to “phase out” fracking by ending taxpayer subsidies for the industry.
The campaign pushed for phasing out existing productive oil and gas fields if suitable alternatives were available “so that people and the economy can transition smoothly to new technologies.”
Democrats Target Kennedy
Mr. Kennedy initially wanted to challenge President Biden for the Democratic Party nomination. However, he alleged that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was “rigging the primary” by not allowing any challenge against President Biden. In October last year, he announced running for the 2024 presidential race as an independent.Mr. Kennedy claimed that Democrats had targeted him.
“The DNC has attacked me as a ‘spoiler candidate.’ They’re spending millions trying to take down my campaign. They never expected our movement to gain the momentum that it has. But I’m not going anywhere,” Mr. Kennedy said in a March 16 post on social media platform X.
“I feel strongly that this is the most important election of our lifetime. And there’s so much at stake, and I do think it’s going to come down to a handful of votes and a handful of states,” she said. “And I do worry that Bobby just taking some percentage of votes from Biden could shift the election and lead to Trump’s election.”
“It’s really about siphoning votes from Biden. The polls I’m seeing … Bobby takes 70 percent of the votes from Biden and 30 percent from Trump.”
Mr. Kennedy is officially on the ballot in Utah but has collected enough signatures to qualify in Nevada, Hawaii, and New Hampshire, according to Politico. Signatures have also been collected from Michigan, South Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia to place Mr. Kennedy on the ballot.
Data from RealClear Polling shows President Trump leading President Biden by a marginal 1.6 percentage point on average if the race boils down to only these two candidates. However, if Mr. Kennedy is added to the mix and it becomes a three-way race, President Trump’s lead will rise to 5.4 percentage points.
In such a situation, President Biden’s support drops from 45 percent in a two-way race to 35.3 percent in a three-way race, while President Trump’s support only declines from 46.6 percent to 40.7 percent.
