WASHINGTON—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chastised former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden for not respecting the Constitution during the COVID-19 pandemic during his speech May 24 at the Libertarian National Convention.
“There’s always a reason why, right now, the rights are an inconvenience that we can’t afford. It was the Red Scare in the 1920s. It was Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. It was civil rights protests and the Vietnam War protests in the 1960s. It was the war on drugs in the 1970s. It was the war on terror after 2001. And most recently, it was the COVID pandemic,” Mr. Kennedy said.
“Maybe a brain worm ate that part of my memory, but I don’t recall any part of the United States Constitution where there’s an exemption for pandemics,” he added.
President Trump was reluctant to impose lockdowns early in the COVID pandemic, but he relented, and “many of our most fundamental rights disappeared practically overnight,” Mr. Kennedy noted.
Mr. Kennedy continued by criticizing the former president for “allowing his health regulators to mandate social distancing, which undermined our First Amendment right to freedom of assembly.”
“With no due process, no public hearings, and no notice,” America was locked down during the pandemic by President Trump, Mr. Kennedy added.
A total of 3.3 million small businesses were closed while Wal-Marts and liquor stores remained open, he remarked.
“President Trump said he was going to run America like a business, and he came in and gave the keys of all of our businesses to a 50-year bureaucrat (Dr. Anthony Fauci) who'd never been elected to anything and had no accountability.
Since entering the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat in April 2023 and then opting to run as an independent last October, Mr. Kennedy has been outspoken about President Trump’s role in moving forward with Operation Warp Speed, a program that rushed the COVID-19 vaccine to market.
When President Biden took office, “the assault on the Constitution intensified,” Mr. Kennedy continued, citing multiple censorship cases.
During his address, Mr. Kennedy also hailed journalist Julian Assange as a hero and reiterated that he would pardon him and Edward Snowden on his first day in office.
“We shouldn’t be putting [Julian Assange] in prison; we should have a monument to him here in Washington D.C.,” Mr. Kennedy said.
President Trump is scheduled to address Libertarian National Convention attendees on May 25.
The former president has escalated verbal attacks on Mr. Kennedy in recent weeks as multiple national polls have shown the independent candidate has support from conservatives and independents. National Republicans have expressed concern that will cut into President Trump’s support on Election Day.
Libertarian Party—‘At a Fork in the Road’
In a press conference before he took the stage a few hours after Mr. Kennedy, entrepreneur, and former Republican presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said there will be “a Libertarian nationalist alliance that rescues this country and revives what our founding fathers envisioned.”Mr. Ramaswamy remarked that former President Donald Trump has “strong Libertarian instincts” and while Mr. Kennedy “is in no sense a Libertarian.”
Midway through Mr. Ramaswamy’s press conference, a convention attendee shouted at him for being at the event and not endorsing one of the party’s presidential candidates. Mr. Ramaswamy said the man was entitled to his free speech before resuming his comments.
“I think the Libertarian Party is also at a fork in the road this year. I think the question the Libertarian Party has to ask is what is its goal? Is the goal to achieve at maximum 3 percent of the general vote, or is the goal to actually shape policy in this country in a meaningful way and work together with what I hope is the next administration, the Trump administration, in the second term, to actualize the vision of this Libertarian movement?”
