Members of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s own family, including his sister, have chosen to support President Biden and will make a public endorsement of him on Thursday.
“More than a dozen members of the extended Kennedy family” will participate in the endorsement, CNN reports.
RFK’s sister Rory, who has worked as a director and producer for HBO, has already called her brother’s candidacy “dangerous.” Another sister, Kerry Kennedy, will reportedly call Biden “a champion for all the rights and freedoms that my father and uncles stood for” while attacking former President Donald Trump with claims such as “Donald Trump is running to take us backwards, attacking the most basic rights and freedoms that are core to who we are as Americans … He has said he will be a dictator on day one, even saying he wants to try to suspend the Constitution.”
“I can only imagine how Donald Trump’s outrageous lies and behavior would have horrified my father, Robert F. Kennedy, who proudly served as Attorney General of the United States, and honored his pledge to uphold the law and protect the country,” she will reportedly add.
RFK Jr., whose campaign manager is Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, his daughter-in-law, responded to the news of the endorsement with some positive comments about his “big family.”
“I hear some of my family will be endorsing President Biden today,” he said. “I am pleased they are politically active – it’s a family tradition. We are divided in our opinions but united in our love for each other. I hold this as a possibility for America too. Can we disagree without hating our opponents? Can we restore civility and respect to public discourse? I think we can.”
The candidate discussed the complexities of his famous family earlier this month. “I have a big family, about 105 cousins on the last time we counted,” he said. “I have a big family. I don’t know anybody in America who’s got a family who agrees with him on everything.”
Biden and RFK Jr. differ significantly on some key issues, including censorship, immigration, and Israel.
Kennedy has stated that Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Trump, contending, “I can make the argument that President Biden is the 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, so to censor his opponent.”
RFK Jr. has also attacked Biden’s immigration policy, saying, “It’s astonishing that the Border Patrol is utterly demoralized. You could stop this very quickly. And it doesn’t seem to be any interest in the Biden administration doing it.”
Kennedy differs from Biden on supporting Israel; he has dismissed calls for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, saying in mid-March that each previous ceasefire “has been used by Hamas to rearm, to rebuild and then launch another surprise attack. So what would be different this time?”
He added, “Any other nation that was adjacent to a neighboring nation that was bombing it with rockets, sending commandos over to murder its citizens, pledging itself to murder every person in that nation and annihilate it, would go and level it with aerial bombardment. But Israel is a moral nation. So it didn’t do that.”
RFK Jr.’s father, Robert Kennedy, had been a staunch supporter of Israel even before it was declared a state. He visited there one month before it declared its independence, writing, that it is “already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect.” He added, “If a Jewish state is formed it will be the only remaining stabilizing factor in the near and far [sic for Near and Middle] East.”