Former President Donald J. Trump has refused to simply accept his loss within the 2020 election, painted as martyrs the supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, laid groundwork to disclaim the 2024 election outcomes if he loses, and mentioned he can be a dictator on his first day again in workplace if he wins.
But based on the impartial presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it’s President Biden who poses the better menace to American democracy — a view that Mr. Kennedy shares with Mr. Trump himself, and that democracy specialists referred to as “absurd” and “preposterous.”
Such a perspective is feasible as a result of Mr. Kennedy, who has based his political profession on selling vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories concerning the authorities, sees the Biden administration’s efforts to curtail the unfold of misinformation as a seminal situation of our time. Censorship, as he calls it, overpowers all different issues concerning the political system.
Mr. Kennedy’s stance drew contemporary scrutiny this week after he mentioned in an interview on CNN, “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 the federal agencies to censor political speech, to censor his opponent.” He repeated himself on Fox News on Tuesday, saying {that a} president like Mr. Biden was “a genuine threat to our democracy.”
The remarks by Mr. Kennedy, who carries the identify however not the help of a storied Democratic household, have been an escalation of his assaults on Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party — and he rapidly backtracked, saying in an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation on Tuesday night time that he had been misunderstood. “What I said was that I could make this argument. 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.”
Mr. Kennedy has lengthy mentioned that the federal government’s engagement with media firms and tech platforms — to forestall the unfold of disinformation or unlawful supplies or, in Mr. Kennedy’s case, the arguments he and his allies made towards vaccines — quantities to unlawful censorship, an argument that was met with skepticism on the Supreme Court final month.
In the CNN and Fox News interviews, Mr. Kennedy — an environmental lawyer who till final fall was himself a Democrat — educated his outrage immediately on the Democratic Party’s chief, whose allies fear that Mr. Kennedy might tip a detailed election in November to Mr. Trump.
Democratic officers have devoted growing sources to a multipronged effort to undermine Mr. Kennedy’s marketing campaign, fearing that his presence on swing-state ballots might siphon votes from Mr. Biden.
At the identical time, it stays unclear whether or not Mr. Kennedy — whose anti-establishment message has additionally made him common with some disaffected Republicans, independents and Libertarians — would draw extra votes from Mr. Biden than from Mr. Trump. A latest Fox News ballot confirmed him drawing about equally from each candidates, and Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Kennedy final week as a “radical Left” candidate, in a possible signal of nervousness about his candidacy.
In marketing campaign appearances, Mr. Kennedy has typically drawn comparisons between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. Last week, when he introduced his working mate, Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer, Mr. Kennedy mentioned that to younger Americans, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump “look like two sides of the same coin.”
But a number of students who’ve studied democratic governments and the methods they’ll backslide instructed The New York Times that it was nonsensical to counsel that social media moderation — which the Supreme Court appeared inclined to uphold as a official purpose of presidency — posed a better menace than what Mr. Trump has carried out.
They pointed to his refusal to simply accept an election loss, his stoking of political violence, and his efforts to consolidate government energy and undermine public confidence in impartial sources of knowledge.
The two most basic tenets of democracy are that politicians “must always unambiguously accept the results of elections and must always unambiguously reject political violence,” mentioned Steven Levitsky, a professor of presidency at Harvard who co-wrote the ebook “How Democracies Die.” “I don’t think you’ll find a democracy expert in the world who will claim that the mild efforts to regulate social media in the United States are somehow equivalent or worse than an effort to overturn an election or the encouragement of political violence.”
Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard College, mentioned Mr. Kennedy had not solely downplayed Mr. Trump’s election denial — a menace that’s “fundamental” and “has to be recognized as such if democracy is going to work,” she mentioned — but in addition inflated Mr. Biden’s actions.
“If we had a president who was using federal agencies to chase down his opponents, to disadvantage them politically, to stop them from being able to speak to citizens and voters, that would be a major infringement of democratic norms,” Dr. Berman mentioned. “That’s not what Biden was doing.”
In the CNN interview, Mr. Kennedy mentioned Mr. Trump’s try to overturn the 2020 election “clearly” was a menace, however added: “The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States who uses the power of his office to force a social media company — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — to open a portal and give access to that portal to the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the I.R.S., the CISA, the N.I.H., to censor his political critics.”
He then mentioned he was not making the argument he had simply made, however was merely saying it was an argument he might make.
He additionally didn’t present proof of any “portal” by way of which federal businesses can take away posts. Rather, he referred to a lawsuit he filed final 12 months alleging that, by threatening regulatory motion, the Biden administration had “induced” social media firms to limit speech — together with anti-vaccine misinformation — in methods the First Amendment would prohibit the federal government from doing immediately.
A federal choose in February granted a preliminary injunction however stayed it till the Supreme Court guidelines in a associated case, Murthy v. Missouri, with which Mr. Kennedy’s case was consolidated. In the meantime, the Supreme Court allowed the federal government, together with the F.B.I., to proceed contact with main social media firms — and in listening to the case final month, the justices appeared skeptical of the arguments towards the federal government.
A lawyer for the federal government, Brian H. Fletcher, instructed the courtroom that banning the regulation in query would itself prohibit speech, together with public feedback from a press secretary or different officers in search of to discourage posts which are dangerous to kids, antisemitic or Islamophobic. He added that the social media firms had acted independently of the federal government and infrequently rejected requests to take down postings.
A senior adviser for the Democratic National Committee referred to as Mr. Kennedy’s feedback “MAGA talking points” that put to relaxation “any doubts that he’s a spoiler candidate.”
“With a straight face, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump because he was barred from pushing conspiracy theories online,” the adviser, Mary Beth Cahill, mentioned. “There is no comparison to summoning a mob to the Capitol and promising to be a dictator on Day 1.”
In the CNN interview, Mr. Kennedy additionally mentioned falsely that Mr. Biden was “the first president in history to use his power over the Secret Service to deny Secret Service protection to one of his political opponents for political reasons,” referring to the federal government’s refusal thus far to increase safety to Mr. Kennedy.
“Major” presidential candidates are eligible for Secret Service safety however aren’t assured it. Whether to grant safety is as much as the secretary of homeland safety, in session with congressional leaders from each main events, and impartial and third-party candidates are much less possible than Democrats and Republicans to obtain it.
In a fund-raising e mail on Tuesday morning, Mr. Kennedy’s marketing campaign reiterated its complaints concerning the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, describing the social gathering as corrupt and attacking its escalating authorized efforts to problem his poll entry and its refusal to permit a debate between Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Biden.
“The Democrat political machine is pulling out every trick in the book to stop our huge momentum,” the e-mail mentioned. “With endless resources, establishment Democrats want to stop a debate between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Biden. They are using a vast network of shadowy dark money groups and vicious attorneys to keep Kennedy-Shanahan ticket off state ballots and spread malicious smears.”
Dr. Levitsky and Dr. Berman each famous that it was uncommon, in a democratic nation, for a politician to explicitly reject democratic norms. It is extra widespread for them to attempt to create a cloud of doubt so voters wrestle to know what’s true.
“Those who engage in misinformation about democracy, those who muddy the waters about what is and isn’t democratic, are complicit in the assault on our democracy,” Dr. Levitsky mentioned. “The kind of behavior that sustains a democracy hasn’t changed over time.”
