RFK Jr SHUTS DOWN Anti-Trump Attack: I'm PROUD To Be Liked By Trump

[Music] we are discussing Democratic 2024 presidential candidate aspirant Robert F Kennedy Junior's Town Hall event with news Nation last night and we were just talking about his answers when asked about his stance on vaccines in general so please be sure to watch that that was a previous segment but Kennedy was also asked to answer why he's running as a Democrat let's listen are you shocked by how you are being treated by the Democrats and their media I'm not happy about it um but I'm I'm not shocked I know you know people get subsumed in orthodoxies I think my I believe that the values that I am trying to promote are the exact values that my father and my uncle would have promoted and I've you know written books about my family I've studied them I have I I you know the more that I've studied my family The more I've written and researched them my uncle and my father the more proud I am of them and I have devoted my life to uh to promoting the same kind of values that I think they promoted and I'm trying to what my one of my purposes in running is to remind the Democratic party of you know what we are supposed to represent and what we've always represented and you know people have said to me why don't you run as an independent wanted you and I say because I'm a Democrat this is who I am this is my identity but I want my party back I want my party to be what my party that I grew up in the party of John Kennedy the party of Robert Kennedy the party of FDR and Harry Truman at a certain point in MS Exchange the moderator points out uh that Donald Trump has said some favorable things about RFK Jr and she asks um you know I don't know I think we don't play that next all right so I'll wait on that for a second so what did you make about this yeah I I mean he's uh he he speaks I mean this is what he's is drawing some significant support in the Democratic nominating contest is because there still is out there in the real world a kind of democrat who remembers fondly the people he mentioned the people from his own family and who I think believe in working class politics and maybe a different foreign policy and maybe you know more of a he's kind of emphasizing a Live and Let Live philosophy on a lot of a lot of issues um that that resonates with uh with yes with Americans in the Democratic party but you you hear from a specific contingent of the democratic party the the elite the the the woke you know you know you know who I'm describing the the mainstream media Elite The Establishment Elite that has a lot of power over the media and has probably are the people surrounding Joe Biden and it speaks to an elite corps of issues that are out of touch with not everyone in the Democratic party there's a lot of them too but people who don't have their voices represented and they like RFK Jr yeah I think it is obviously true that there are two corporate parties and most uh voters most Americans are frustrated with that reality low voter participation rates are a reflection of a low government confidence but you see reflected in polls and the media is broadly out of touch with the core concerns of working class Americans you have conservatives really positioning themselves as kind of anti-woke framing their entire people like Rhonda Sanders their entire political agenda around you know a few with Disneyland and Bud Light beer cans and things like that and the Democratic party which has historically been the party that represented labor made a shift and RFK Jr has talked about this but made a shift in the 70s and 80s toward taking more corporate money which had historically been the province of Republican politicians and started to have more conservative economic policies as a consequence of that so now you have two economically conservative parties that distinguish themselves solely on the basis of how they react to cultural issues and so we've had a ratcheting up of the division around those cultural issues taking relatively small poor populations like trans kids of which there are only a few thousand and making them a national case so that no one is paying attention to the fact that their bank accounts are getting smaller their dollar goes less far than it did before the prices of housing a price of housing has ballooned etc etc so yeah I think there is some real legitimate Nostalgia for yes year I don't think it's necessarily that productive to just generally cast back into the past and say well it was better that back then without talking about the fact that the tax rate for the rich was much higher corporate tax rate was much higher we had much more robust funding to social programs Etc there's a reason why things were better that back then for the average American but I do think he's very right to tap into the feeling and again not for all Americans of course but to the feeling that economically our policies were much more populous in the past we want to play the next clip here moderator Elizabeth Vargas press Kennedy on the sport he's receiving for major figures on the right including Steve Bannon here's how he responded my father was able to harness these populist energies in the last day of his life he won the most rural state in this country South Dakota and mother's Urban he was able to bridge The Divide among people who would otherwise be Republican but wanted somebody who was Common Sense who was able to appeal to their idealism who was able to find the hero in each of them who is able to get them to transcend narrow self-interest and see themselves as part of a community and part of this you know incredible American Adventure in in modeling self-governance for the rest of the world and so I'm proud that President Trump likes me even though I don't agree with him on most of his issues I'm because I don't want to alienate people I want to bring people together I'm proud that all these people like me and that I have independent supporters and Democratic supporters and I'm able to bring a lot of people you know every Democrat says I want to end the polarization but how do you do that without talking to people who don't agree with you how do you do that without appealing to people without the per my purpose is to find the issue the values that we have in common rather than you know focus on the issues and the personalities that keep us all apart I think again that goes to show that I mean it's just he's practicing good politics there and it's a reminder of like what is a disastrous candidate Hillary Clinton was for example the the deplorables comment that's the opposite of the deploral view that you know I need I need to win people of of all ideological bents races Creeds and colors and and of all political sides I mean that's how Trump won in 2016 by peeling off some people who are otherwise Democrats and had voted for Democrats in the past and were not sold on Hillary Clinton and she had done nothing to message to them and they they were Bernie curious but they but Hillary was the candidate and she didn't speak to them and Trump won enough of them in Michigan Pennsylvania and a few other places to become the president and then he didn't win them in 2020 because he didn't he didn't sell himself or they were turned off by the things he said or they were just drowned out by the other by the other people in the country reacting against him and voting for Biden but uh but it's just like good politics that you have to you like you want everyone to be saying good things about you yeah listen to how easy that is I'm glad that Trump likes me even though I disagree with him you've established that you have basically an endorsement from someone who's very popular without tying yourself to any of his policy commitments and without disrespecting any of the people that like him now contrast that with what some of the players in the Republican field have been struggling with they often will perhaps go too far in validating aspects of his agenda that actually aren't that politically popular and which are somewhat toxic they will be obsequious uh and praise things that are not really policy related and don't need to be praised in a way that undermines their own credibility especially now that they're running against him and and doing a real heel turn the way that Chris Christie has on his views about Donald Trump it is possible to come up with a response that respects the audience without diminishing your own integrity and I think we just saw a really fantastic example of how to model a response to what do you do when someone who you don't like likes you back he just simply didn't opine on his substantive feelings about Trump as a man out of respect I believe for an audience many of whom like Trump and instead said look we disagreed on substantive policy issues I don't agree with him but it is a good thing that someone like even someone like him sees the value in somebody like me yeah he he responded to to uh to Elizabeth Vargas when she asked him and I think this is a fair question but he had a great answer she said well you know nobody in your family is even supporting you and he says well does everybody in your family agree with you and she and she laughed about she said well no of course we all have that experience people disagree even in their own family yeah I mean it is interesting that he keeps getting that question yeah uh it did feel especially when he first announced that you know the call went out and there were two prongs of attack that were gonna come at him from the corporate media one was you're an anti-vaxxer and two was that even your family doesn't like you and I think the presumption was well let's diminish the value of the Kennedy Name by lining all of the Kennedys up on one side that aren't him and say they don't like you and then he's the lone Kennedy who's like not a real Kennedy or something like that I've noticed that this could be I guess selection bias from my standpoint I've noticed that Democrats seem to love this tactic and I've never seen it that I can recall it being deployed by Republicans like even against local officials sometimes somebody you know some local Republican and Democrats will run an ad saying but his own brother and sister and twin and you know weird Uncle all say he's crazy and you shouldn't vote for him I've never seen or maybe it's happened I just can't recall it it's something different yeah I don't know well I will say sometimes I do think that there is some a little bit more meat behind it and recently obviously there was a Herschel Walker debacle where his son came out in the context of that campaign making some very personal accusations about their family Dynamic which may have negatively affected him and I think that final stress a little bit different um because it felt it felt more about character um the allegations were the kinds of things that many people would consider to be disqualifying here the allegation is your family doesn't agree with you on one narrow aspect of your life and your beliefs but they still love you and embrace you and want to be with you at Thanksgiving dinner the Herschel Walker situation was much more contentious than that right well we've got one more clip to play from last night here's RFK Jr on the U.S budget and our priorities are spending priorities as well as more spending we're sending 113 billion dollars to the to the Ukraine the the entire budget of CDC is 12 billion the budget of EPA is 12 billion 57 of Americans could not put their hands on a thousand dollars if they have an emergency in their family 25 of Americans are hungry oh I have a friend who was on food stamps he's a commercial fisherman he's worked his entire life to the work to the phone created a business gave it to his son-in-law and he is he was injured he's on permanent disability he was getting food stamps 283 dollars a month and those food stamps are now worth a lot less because the inflation from paying for the wars caused 76 percent rise in dairy milk and eggs over the past two years on March 1st he got a robo call from the government saying that his food stamps are being cut by 90 so he was getting 283 a month which you can't feed yourself on nine dollars a day he's now getting 23 dollars a month trying to feed himself on 80 cents a day that same month 30 million Americans got that call that month in March another 15 million had their Medicare cut that same month we spent we printed 300 billion dollars to bail out the Silicon Valley Bank and we topped off Ukraine at 113 billion oh we don't we have money plenty of money for the big shots who need their bank bailouts and for any war that comes along but if you took that 113 million that billion that we've given to the Ukraine and spend it here we wouldn't have to to cut one dollar from food stamps for that 30 million Americans and we're acting like an alcoholic who's you know behind on his mortgage and he's taking the milk money and buying rounds for strangers at the bar yeah I think that's a very powerful message especially if at the time period we're living in right now I think there's a lot of resentment among certainly many Republicans but probably many Democrats as well that uh that that the federal government finds no shortage of money misplaced some money Ukraine Got a bonus oops Yeah uh for every every foreign policy Venture any you know even the people we've had Republicans on the show who who will Who will complain about spending and won't do anything about military spending and he can actually make the case there that um that so many Republicans can't sometimes because they don't actually want to they want to constrain social spending but they don't want to constrain military spending 100 many Democrats don't want to constrain either and and he points out how they can be intention with each other a hundred percent the this is such a layup for any politician to grab the reins of it's bizarre that more people haven't been using this exact framing now I do think to your point some Republicans have been saying things like this but they also don't want to expand domestic spending there's a there was a series of viral tweets over the last day or two because a number of conservatives who voted against the infrastructure Bill have been tweeting approvingly of money that is coming to their districts and Democrats have been pointing out oh now you want to be here at the ribbon cutting but you voted against this funding coming to your state in the first place if you as an if I'm an ideological perspective oppose all domestic spending as Republicans historically have because the the basis of the ideological the uh the ideology and the party is to shrink government no matter what cost you're going to be in a position where you have to justify you're gonna have to justify cuts to very popular policies like Medicare and Social Security which was the whole Brewhouse over the last year after the state of the union and you're also going to have to deal with the fact that you need those dollars coming to your state that your citizens like them whether it's military spending or infrastructure spending or whatever it is those are jobs in your state and the tension between Republicans talking about I need more jobs and I don't want there to be any domestic spending is really being exploited um uh well by RFK Jr in this moment yeah well we will continue to follow RFK Jr and all the other candidates potentially for president in both sides of the political aisle that we'll have more Rising right after this [Music] foreign

Channel: The Hill

Views: 81,068

Keywords: Rising, Progressive, Progressive Politics, Democrats, Democratic Party, Republicans, GOP, Republican Party, RFK, RFK Jr, NewsNation, CNN, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Ron DeSantis, 2024, Covid, Elizabeth Vargas, FDA, CDC, Populist, Hillary Clinton, Populism, Conservative, Liberal

Id: WizLK8l248I

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023