Trump Takes Aim at Kennedy
Blake Fleetwood | April 29, 2024
By Blake Fleetwood, The Kennedy Beacon
Donald Trump and Joe Biden agree: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is becoming a real threat to the Uniparty.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump, who has praised Kennedy in the past, called him a “Democratic plant” on his
Kennedy swung back, posting on X on April 27, “Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims.” After calling out Trump’s record as president, Kennedy challenged him to a debate. “Instead of lobbing poisonous bombs from the safety of his bunker,” he wrote, “let’s hear President Trump defend his record to me mano-a-mano by respectful, congenial debate.”
The counter-strike provoked another Trump jab at Kennedy, this one on Sunday morning, April 28 on Truth Social. Trump wrote that Kennedy is “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat, including West and Stein.”
It’s no wonder Trump is lashing out and getting nervous: Kennedy is drawing support from more Republicans. Last week’s TMZ poll of 56,000 (larger than any other poll sample) showed that Kennedy would easily win an election against Trump.
Trump has largely changed his tune since last June when he praised RFK Jr. on the Howard Carr radio show. He called Kennedy “Smart” and “A good man,” “Whose heart is in the right place; He’s a common sense guy and so am I.” The post continued, “Whether you are conservative or liberal, common sense is common sense.”
Trump also called Kennedy a “useful chaos agent,” meaning he would screw things up for the Democrats by stealing votes from Biden.
The accepted wisdom for most of the past year by both Republicans and Democrats has been that Kennedy draws more votes from President Biden and that a vote for Kennedy is a vote to elect Trump.
At first, the Democratic playbook was to ignore Kennedy. President Biden never mentioned his name. When that didn’t work, the democratic party had its allies in the mainstream media call him a conspiracy nut and anti-science.
They said that his campaign was being financed by Trump supporters to draw democratic voters away from Biden and listed all the Republican donors who supported Kennedy. The Democrats charged that Republican operative Steve Bannon was the mastermind who got Kennedy in the race and is running his campaign behind the scenes.
The DNC put up anti-Kennedy billboards in Michigan, which feature a headshot of Kennedy on one side and Trump on the other. The words claim that “RFK Jr. powered by MAGA Trump. Same biggest donor Timothy Mellon,” in the center.
Democratic protesters outside a Los Angeles train station held up signs proclaiming the same message: Kennedy is a “spoiler powered by MAGA.”
The Democrats have reasons to be worried. A recent Gallup poll found that Biden is the least popular president in the last 70 years, below Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, threatening his chances of re-election.
Biden, 81, notched a dismal 38.7% job approval rating for the first quarter of 2024, the venerable Gallup Poll found in a survey released Friday, three points lower than that of the one-term George H.W. Bush at the same point in his presidency.
Overall, Biden’s favorability rating has dipped to 41%, down eight percentage points from the end of the 2020 campaign. Trump’s current 42% favorability is down three percentage points from November 2020. Seems that nobody likes either of them.
The Democrats also organized a multi-million dollar attack machine to paint Kennedy as a stooge for Trump and stop him from getting on the ballot in many states. Biden and his allies also remain wary of Kennedy, as they have worked overtime to turn some of his family against him and urge them to call him a spoiler.
Maybe they should have saved their money.
Recent polls by Marist College and NBC News show Biden doing better than Trump when other candidates are included on the ballot, including Kennedy and third-party aspirants Cornel West and Jill Stein.
“Trump holds a 2-point edge over Biden head to head, but Biden leads Trump by 2 points in a five-way ballot test including Kennedy and other third-party candidates,” NBC News reported. Stein and West clearly take votes from Biden. Internal campaign polls today show that if Kennedy were to drop out of the race, 57% of his supporters would vote for Trump. But this polling can change every week. Clearly Trump has some good reasons to be going all-out against Kennedy. Trump is scared that Republican voters might desert him for Kennedy, particularly with all the publicity that his recent tawdry court cases are generating.
Kennedy is a wild card and many of his supporters may come from a ‘Never Voter” class (40% of the electorate) that is not typically polled.
Trump now seems to believe that Kennedy is a spoiler and a ‘democratic plant’ designed to thwart his re-election. While the Democrats call him a spoiler and a Republican plant for Biden.
General dissatisfaction with both Biden and Trump continues to grow, according to a new CNN/SSRS poll that puts Kennedy at 16% in a five-way race. Moreover, Biden’s record is viewed as one of failure by 61% of Americans. On an issue-by-issue basis, the majority of voters disapprove of the incumbent’s handling of every major issue from the economy and border to all major foreign policy crises.
What is going on here? Everything is topsy-turvy.
Kennedy doesn’t seem worried about the brouhaha and has long maintained that he is a spoiler and will take votes from “both Trump and Biden.”
He says America needs a radical change, that both Republicans and Democrats are part of the same Uniparty that has destroyed the middle class, created a corporate takeover in Washington, and benefited the Military Industrial Complex with a series of endless wars that have resulted in a $33 trillion deficit, money that could best be spent at home.
Common sense is common sense, whether you are a liberal or a conservative.
Blake Fleetwood was a reporter for The New York Times and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Village Voice, Atlantic and the Washington Monthly on a number of issues. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-fleetwood
