The Real Reason RFK Jr. Called Biden a Worse Threat Than Trump

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Voters who consider “threats to democracy” a major issue in the 2024 presidential election generally come in two varieties. There are Democrats (and Democratic-leaning independents) who fear Donald Trump wants to steal the 2024 election, just as he attempted in 2020, and will misuse his powers to punish his enemies. And there are Republicans (along with Republican-leaning independents) who think Joe Biden “rigged” the last election and is now persecuting Trump. These are mostly mutually exclusive camps of people, as you might well imagine.

But now Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is setting himself up as an independent candidate who believes that both major-party candidates pose “threats to democracy.” And as a matter of fact, he thinks Joe Biden is a bigger threat, as the New York Times reports:

Mr. Kennedy, who has founded his political career on promoting vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about the government, sees the Biden administration’s efforts to curtail the spread of misinformation as a seminal issue of our time. Censorship, as he calls it, overpowers all other concerns about the political system.

Mr. Kennedy’s stance drew fresh scrutiny this week after he said in an interview on CNN, “President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, to censor his opponent.” He repeated himself on Fox News on Tuesday, saying that a president like Mr. Biden was “a genuine threat to our democracy.”

Kennedy sees conspiracies between government and corporations affecting virtually every element of life in America. So it’s not surprising that he views the Biden administration encouraging social-media platforms’ efforts to prevent the dissemination of medical misinformation not only as “censorship” but as harmful to democracy itself. Trump is another conspiracy theorist who tells voters they are being preyed upon by elites who insist on “facts” and “data” you cannot trust. Unsurprisingly, RFK Jr. considers Trump more benign.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump evaluated Kennedy’s claims that Biden personally tried to stop his brave and noble truth telling. He concluded that Kennedy spread misinformation about Biden’s conduct, just as he made false claims about the lethality of COVID vaccines. It turns out Biden’s “censoring” of RFK Jr. amounted to an email from a White House staffer to a Twitter staffer wondering if the company might remove a tweet that falsely suggested baseball legend Hank Aaron died due to a COVID vaccine. Twitter did not remove the post. As Bump wrote, RFK Jr. “was later banned from Instagram for spreading vaccine misinformation but remained on Twitter, sparking third-party criticism of the platforms for not acting in response to his false claims.”

Putting aside the question of whether Kennedy actually believes his own spin about his anti-vaxx activities and how they were treated by social-media outlets, it’s worth asking what he hopes to accomplish politically by lumping in Biden with Trump as a threat to democracy. The most likely answer goes to the very heart of his 2024 strategy: RFK Jr. is very much the candidate of what political analysts call “the double haters,” voters who dislike both Biden and Trump for various reasons and would prefer a credible alternative. Recent polls have estimated the number of “double haters” at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the total electorate. Kennedy’s share of the vote in the RCP polling averages of a five-way contest including Biden, Trump, Cornel West, and Jill Stein is currently at 10.4 percent. His obvious route to grow his vote is via the 4 to 18 percent of voters who don’t like the major-party candidates but aren’t backing Kennedy. And if he can help increase the number of “double haters” by describing the two major candidates as “threats to democracy,” there will be even more people open to voting for Kennedy. It’s possible that he believes Biden is more vulnerable to raids on his supporters because they are less personally attached to their candidate than Trump backers; Kennedy is already pulling more votes from the Democratic candidate than from the Republican. So calling Biden an even bigger threat to democracy than the obviously scofflaw Trump could be a matter of hunting where the ducks are.

By the late summer or early fall, RFK Jr. is going to need to demonstrate that he’s a viable candidate to win the presidency. If he doesn’t, he will almost certainly begin to lose votes as his supporters choose either to cast their lot with Trump or Biden as the “lesser of two evils” or to stay home. Kennedy needs to encourage a lot more “hate” and mistrust toward the 45th and 46th presidents if he wants to become the 47th. He’s doing his part to make that happen.