Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Fox News host Jesse Watters Thursday evening to discuss former President Donald Trump’s conviction earlier in the day on 34 felony counts related to a hush money payment ahead of the 2016 election that prior New York and federal prosecutors and officials said was not criminal in nature.
“I think that it is going to backfire, this conviction is going to backfire,” Kennedy, a former Democrat-turned-independent, told the host. “The Democrats, I think every time that President Trump has been indicted, that his approval ratings actually increase, his popularity increases. I think there’s a large number of Americans who are going to see this as the politicization or the weaponization of the enforcement agencies.
“I think it’s bad for our democracy. I think the Democrats feel like they have — the DNC feels like it has a candidate that cannot win fair and square in the polls. And so they have to win in the courts. They have to win by clearing the deck and getting their other opponents out of the race,” he added.
RFK Jr. went on to say he’s no fan of many of Trump’s policies while in office but noted further that taking him out of the race using lawfare is not how he wants to win.
“I don’t want to beat him in a courtroom. I think it’s not good for our country and I think it’s really going to backfire on the Democrats,” he said, going on to point out that when his father was the attorney general in 1961 under his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, RFK Sr. instructed all Justice Department officials and prosecutors that politics were never to be a motivating factor in bringing cases.
“The reason he did that is because he understood how important it is for our country and the American people to have faith that the judicial system is neutral and all of us need to respect it,” RFK Jr. said.
“If we start believing that it’s politicized, it’s terrible for our country. That’s one of the reasons prosecutors, even when there’s a case against the former president like there was with President Nixon and many, many others, that they usually err on the side of caution of not bringing it because we risk making ourselves look like a third world country, like a banana republic where nobody really actually runs the election,” he added.
“It’s because the media lets them. If we had a fair press in the United States, [Democrats] wouldn’t even be tempted to pull these stunts,” Watters responded. “They wouldn’t be trying to incarcerate their rivals and indict people for threatening their power. It’s the media that’s letting them get away with it because they are just not held accountable in the court of public opinion.”
“I agree with that. There is tribalism in the media and a lot of them have forgotten what journalism is. A lot of them have forgotten about what integrity is. We see this across the board,” Kennedy replied.
“I would say to people in the Democratic Party, even if you won this way, what is it going to do to our country if half the people in this country have the anger and the rage and feel like the candidate that they wanted to vote for has been taken off the table. When I was growing up the Democratic party was the party of getting everybody to vote, of making sure nobody got disenfranchised. The modern Democratic party is trying to get rid of as many possibilities for voters as possible, and it’s not a good thing,” he said.
