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 effects if he loses, and mentioned he can be a dictator on his first day again in place of business if he wins.
But in line with the impartial presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it’s President Biden who poses the higher risk to American democracy — a view that Mr. Kennedy stocks with Mr. Trump himself, and that democracy professionals referred to as “absurd” and “preposterous.”
Such a point of view is imaginable as a result of Mr. Kennedy, who has based his political profession on selling vaccine incorrect information and conspiracy theories concerning the executive, sees the Biden management’s efforts to curtail the unfold of incorrect information as a seminal factor of our time. Censorship, as he calls it, overpowers all different considerations concerning the political gadget.
Mr. Kennedy’s stance drew recent scrutiny this week after he said in an interview on CNN, “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, pronouncing {that a} president like Mr. Biden used to be “a genuine threat to our democracy.”
The remarks via Mr. Kennedy, who carries the identify however now not the fortify of a storied Democratic circle of relatives, had been an escalation of his assaults on Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party — and he temporarily backtracked, pronouncing in an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsCountry on Tuesday night time that he were 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 corporations and tech platforms — to stop the unfold of disinformation or unlawful fabrics or, in Mr. Kennedy’s case, the arguments he and his allies made towards vaccines — quantities to unlawful censorship, an issue that used to be met with skepticism on the Supreme Court closing month.
In the CNN and Fox News interviews, Mr. Kennedy — an environmental attorney who till closing fall used to be himself a Democrat — skilled his outrage without delay at the Democratic Party’s chief, whose allies fear that Mr. Kennedy may just tip an in depth election in November to Mr. Trump.
Democratic officers have trustworthy expanding assets to a multipronged effort to undermine Mr. Kennedy’s marketing campaign, fearing that his presence on swing-state ballots may just siphon votes from Mr. Biden.
At the similar time, it stays unclear whether or not Mr. Kennedy — whose anti-establishment message has additionally made him well-liked by some disaffected Republicans, independents and Libertarians — would draw extra votes from Mr. Biden than from Mr. Trump. A recent Fox News poll confirmed him drawing about similarly from each applicants, and Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Kennedy closing week as a “radical Left” candidate, in a possible signal of anxiety about his candidacy.
In marketing campaign appearances, Mr. Kennedy has continuously drawn comparisons between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. Last week, when he introduced his working mate, Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley attorney, 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 tactics they may be able to backslide instructed The New York Times that it used to be nonsensical to signify that social media moderation — which the Supreme Court gave the impression vulnerable to uphold as a valid purpose of presidency — posed a better risk than what Mr. Trump has executed.
They pointed to his refusal to simply accept an election loss, his stoking of political violence, and his efforts to consolidate govt energy and undermine public self assurance in impartial resources of information.
The two maximum elementary 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 e book “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 now not simplest downplayed Mr. Trump’s election denial — a risk this is “fundamental” and “has to be recognized as such if democracy is going to work,” she mentioned — but in addition inflated Mr. Biden’s movements.
“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” used to be a risk, 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 used to be now not making the argument he had simply made, however used to be merely pronouncing it used to be an issue he may just make.
He additionally didn’t supply proof of any “portal” in which federal companies can take away posts. Rather, he referred to a lawsuit he filed closing yr alleging that, via threatening regulatory motion, the Biden management had “induced” social media corporations to limit speech — together with anti-vaccine incorrect information — in tactics the First Amendment would limit the federal government from doing without delay.
A federal pass judgement on in February granted a preliminary injunction however stayed it till the Supreme Court regulations in a comparable case, Murthy v. Missouri, with which Mr. Kennedy’s case used to be consolidated. In the intervening time, the Supreme Court allowed the federal government, together with the F.B.I., to proceed touch with primary social media corporations — and in listening to the case closing month, the justices seemed skeptical of the arguments towards the federal government.
A attorney for the federal government, Brian H. Fletcher, instructed the courtroom that banning the law in query would itself limit speech, together with public feedback from a press secretary or different officers looking for to deter posts which might be damaging to kids, antisemitic or Islamophobic. He added that the social media corporations had acted independently of the federal government and continuously 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 leisure “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 used to be “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,” relating to the federal government’s refusal to this point to increase coverage to Mr. Kennedy.
“Major” presidential applicants are eligible for Secret Service coverage however don’t seem to be assured it. Whether to grant coverage is as much as the secretary of place of origin safety, in session with congressional leaders from each primary events, and impartial and third-party applicants are much less most probably than Democrats and Republicans to obtain it.
In a fund-raising e-mail on Tuesday morning, Mr. Kennedy’s marketing campaign reiterated its proceedings concerning the Biden management and the Democratic Party, describing the occasion as corrupt and attacking its escalating felony efforts to problem his poll get entry to 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 used to be uncommon, in a democratic nation, for a political candidate to explicitly reject democratic norms. It is extra commonplace for them to take a look at to create a cloud of doubt so electorate battle to grasp what is right.
“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.”