Third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is setting the record straight…
RFK Jr. sharply criticized President Joe Biden during a Monday interview on CNN, saying an argument can be made that Biden is a huge threat to Democracy.
Kennedy's Monday interview with CNN's Erin Burnett triggered a slew of headlines when he told the anchor that he “can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy” than former President Donald Trump. Here is the full quote in question from that interview:
Listen, I can make the argument that 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 federal agencies to censor political speech.
According to Mediaite, CNN's Daniel Dale swiftly fact-checked his claims, and the argument that “Biden is a worse threat to democracy” garnered Kennedy a lot of criticism, especially considering how Trump tried to overturn a legitimate election he lost.
On Tuesday, RFK Jr. appeared on NewsNation's Cuomo and blamed CNN Digital for framing his statement inaccurately, using the headline “RFK Jr. argues that Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Trump.”
Host Chris Cuomo asked him directly: “Do you want people to believe that you think President Biden has done more objectionable things vis-a-vis our democracy than former President Trump did in the aftermath of the last election?” His response:
What I said was that I can make this argument, and I didn't say definitively whether I believed one or the other was more dangerous to democracy. I did say that I don't believe either of them are going to destroy democracy. Both sides are telling us the other guy is the end of the republic. But you know, they're both lame duck presidents. They're going to be in there four years. Like, their political opponents are going to be announced two years later, there'll be a new Congress in two years later. And we have strong institutions in our country — we have judiciary, we have the press, to some extent, we've got Congress, and you have the military. You've got a lot of institutions that that are bulwarks against a tyrant coming in to take over democracy. I don't think that's gonna happen.
I think we're all being told each one is a threat because it's a way of using fear to force us into a binary choice where we're forced into the canal, this channel that nobody wants to go to where we either have to vote for it, we have to vote for the lesser of two evils, and nobody wants to do that. But it keeps them from, you know, it keeps a lot of the public from considering people like me that have much, I have a much higher popularity rating than either these candidates, so more people would rather see me in office than presumably than either of them. But they're not going to vote for me because the, you know, the media and this whole sort of cartel from both sides is telling them, “Oh, you have to choose between these two guys, the other guy is so scary.”
Kennedy did express gratitude for the way Burnett conducted the interview, placing the blame for the backlash on CNN Digital:
I'm very grateful, by the way, to Erin Burnett. As you know, CNN has not let me on for a live interview in a decade. And she did that, she was very, very courageous. She gave me a very fair interview. I was really dumbfounded about how fair it was. She pushed back on me a lot. And she doesn't agree with me obviously on stuff, but she actually let me speak which was, I'm grateful for it. When CNN Digital got it. They cut my quote so it looked like I was making this definitive statement that Biden was more of a threat to democracy than Trump. But of course, I never said that. But that's the way it made me look crazy to liberals.