Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a historic speech on Friday, laid out some of the issues with the Democrat Party, pointing to the irony of the fact that Democrats essentially dismantled democracy while supposedly trying to save it.
Kennedy, who suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed former President Donald Trump, explained how he arrived at his current position during his historic speech in Arizona.
“Sixteen months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for president of the United States,” Kennedy said. “I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle, the party which I pledged my own allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote.” He walked through his history as a Democrat, asserting that the party, in the past, was full of “champions of the constitution of civil rights” and “stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, [and] against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars.”
“We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy,” he said, explaining that this is no longer the case.
Because of that, he formally left the party in 2023, upset that Democrats became the party of censorship, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Money, and more.
This party, he said, is the same party that aimed to “conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president.”
“I left the party to run as an independent. The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision,” he said, unleashing on the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
“And, most sadly — at all, for me, for the Democratic Party — in the name of saving Democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it, lacking confidence in its candidate, that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth,” he said.
“The DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself,” he explained.
“Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions,” he said, blasting it for deploying DNC “aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail.”
“Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor — also without an election,” he observed.
“They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate,” he said of Vice President Kamala Harris, showcasing just how the Democrat Party subverted democracy.
“They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days,” he said, referencing his uncle and father.
“This is profoundly undemocratic,” he said.
“How are people to choose when they don’t know whom they are choosing, and how can this look to the rest of the world?” he asked.
Members of the Kennedy family expressed disappointment in RFK Jr.’s decision, deeming it a form of “betrayal.”
RFK Jr’s siblings call his endorsement of Trump “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.” pic.twitter.com/XLq1jACPu8
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 23, 2024
“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise, and national pride,” they wrote in a joint statement.
“We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” they said, adding, “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”