Fox News Digital recently caught up with independent presidential candidate RFK Jr. at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, where in a wide-ranging interview he spoke about the viability of a campaign, the COVID pandemic and immigration policy, and harshly criticized both the Trump and Biden administrations regarding civil liberties and the weaponization of the Justice Department.
Though Kennedy is trailing far behind Trump and Biden in the polls, he believes his campaign has momentum.
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“Two national polls came out this week. The Harris X poll puts me at 19% approval rating, and the Pew poll puts me at 15% approval rating. My approval rating is growing. I am currently beating Presidents Biden and Trump among independents. I am also winning among Americans under 35. My approval rating and favorability ratings are higher than either of them. I am doing well among black and Hispanic voters, but not among Baby Boomers, who watch the mainstream networks like CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and read The New York Times and The Washington Post.”
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at a Cesar Chavez Day event at Union Station on March 30, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Kennedy has been a leading and fierce critic of the Trump and Biden administrations’ response to the pandemic, holding both Republican and Democratic administrations responsible for violating civil rights.
“The Constitution is just a piece of paper, and it only works as long as people believe in it. One thing we need to do is bring civics back into American schools. We’ve abandoned it, and I think that’s one of the reasons why our civil rights have been taken away so easily.”
“Both of them have destroyed our democracy and our republic. We saw it with the COVID pandemic, both of them shutting down, both of them attacking the Constitution. All property rights suspended, the Fifth Amendment violated, 3.3 million businesses closed. Free speech censored, the First Amendment violated, every church in the country closed without any scientific basis or due process, the First Amendment violated, the right to assemble and petition extinguished with social distancing rules…Both the Biden Administration and the Trump Administration have done that, but I don’t think either president can be trusted to protect the Constitution.”
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Kennedy is a strong believer in securing the southern border and supports returning to some of the Trump-era policies, arguing that Biden administration policies have been ineffective.
“I will absolutely secure the border. I’ve spent a lot of time on the border, I’ve talked to law enforcement, Border Patrol, and one of the things that makes me optimistic is that everybody is saying we can stop this…We need to fill the 27 missing gaps in the wall…We need to do personnel changes, we need more asylum judges, more Border Patrol agents. And we need regulatory changes…We also need to change our catch and release policy to a catch and return policy, which is a Trump-era policy.”
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He is a strong supporter of legal migration but believes current policy gives border policy control to dangerous criminal organizations.
“We want to open up the door wide for people to come legally, create a fast track to citizenship and ensure we have the workers we need in this country right now, but at the same time make sure that no one comes into the country illegally. Right now, the Sinaloa drug cartel is running U.S. immigration policy and no one thinks that’s a good idea.”
Kennedy promised to bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table for a quick resolution to the conflict.
“I will end the war in Ukraine immediately and enter into peace negotiations with President Putin. President Putin has tried many times to negotiate a peace agreement with us. He negotiated and signed a very favorable agreement in April 2022, and the Zelenskyy administration also signed it, but the Biden administration had President Zelenskyy tear it up.”
He did not elaborate on what territory he would ask Ukraine to cede, but he argued that the Biden administration is prolonging the conflict.
“I won’t tell you where the end of the negotiations are, because that’s not your job, but I can tell you that we are in a much worse state of negotiations than we were in April 2022, when the Biden administration destroyed the peace process.”
A 2022 study by the Commonwealth Fund found that the U.S. spends far more on health care than other countries but generally has poorer health outcomes. Kennedy has vowed to take on the health care bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical industry.
“My solution is to end the chronic disease epidemic. Chronic disease is causing the health care crisis. We spend $4.3 trillion on health care, most of it on chronic disease. And we have the worst health outcomes among the top 79 countries in the world…I know how to do that. I know how to change the mission of the NIH so that it’s no longer in league with the pharmaceutical industry to incubate new medicines.”
Media members slammed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for saying that President Biden is “far worse” for democracy than former President Donald Trump. (Fox News)
Kennedy has accused both administrations of pumping politically motivated legalism through the judicial system.
“The weaponization of the Department of Justice is the fault of both Democrats and Republicans. You remember in 2016, 2020, President Trump appointed a special counsel and promised to put Hillary Clinton in jail. That gave the go-ahead and both sides of the political process to start weaponizing our government… We’re going to make sure the American people know that justice is blind, justice is neutral and that duty has been abandoned by both administrations.”
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Kennedy has long been active in Latin America, having spent significant time there. He credits his father and uncle’s policies with appealing to the region’s poor and sees interventionism as an ineffective strategy for promoting American values and deterring communism.
“The people of Latin America have the right to choose their own leaders, and I think a lot of the anti-American attitudes in Latin America come from our history of meddling in the region. I think we need to be partners with the region, as my uncle and my father did… They created the Alliance for Progress, they created the U.S. Agency for International Development to put America on the side of the poor people in these countries, to remove the temptation to embrace communist values… And every intervention we’ve had in Latin America has worked against us… We need to be partners with these governments and societies, not bullies.”
