Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat down with Bill Maher on Friday evening — and GOP challenger Donald Trump deigned to watch what unfolded Saturday. Trump offered his hot take Sunday on Truth Social, where he wrote that Kennedy “has no hope as a Democrat because they were able to use their typically Fascist tactics of repression and throw him out of the Party, like a dog.”
Trump’s message read, “I actually watched, first time in a long time, ratings challenged Bill Maher’s really boring interview with RFK Jr. last night, only to find that Junior’ is far more LIBERAL than Maher and, in fact, far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat, including [Cornel] West and [Jill] Stein.”
Trump didn’t provide evidence to back up his assertion that the independent West and Green Party candidate Stein were less liberal than the anti-vaccine Kennedy, who switched from running for the Democratic nomination to an independent bid last fall.
“Yet despite this, he has no hope as a Democrat because they were able to use their typically Fascist tactics of repression and throw him out of the Party, like a dog, because he was taking primary votes away from the worst President in the history of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump continued.
A new CNN poll released Sunday indicated that Kennedy actually caused Trump to win by a greater margin nationally than in a head-to-head race between Trump and President Joe Biden.
“So now, Junior’s a so-called Independent, but he’s not, he’s a Radical Left Lunatic, but trying to have it all ways. He said that ‘No Vaccine is safe and effective,’ and then said ‘I would never say that, I’m not anti-vaccine!’ Where did that come from?”
Vaccines were certainly a hot topic for Maher and Kennedy. In their interview, Maher point blank asked the candidate if he agreed with Nicole Shanahan, his pick for his vice president, who recently said the Moderna vaccine should be recalled.
“I think the… you know, I think those vaccines need to… we need to have, again, true double-blind placebo-controlled trials on that,” Kennedy answered. “There’s 25% of Americans who believe that they know somebody who was killed by a COVID vaccine.”
Describing the interview, Trump concluded his Truth Social post writing, “Maher defended the vaccine, which Junior actually seemed to agree with (WOW!), and then told him that his poll numbers have crashed. No Republican can vote for this guy. MAGA2024!”
A KFF health misinformation poll conducted in 2023 concluded that 34% of Americans believe COVID vaccines have contributed to deaths.
After Maher skeptically asked, “Killed?” Kennedy nodded in and proceeded to pepper the conversation with additional vaccine misinformation. When Kennedy attempted to insist that deaths due to COVID-19 in vaccinated individuals meant the “vaccine didn’t work at all,” Maher jumped in.
“No, no… It’s not true at all, and I’m somebody who did not want the vaccine and didn’t think I should have been made to get it, but it does work,” he said.
“[It] works in the sense that if you were… many people who would have died because they were not in good health, it killed mostly the obese and the very elderly,” Maher continued. “Those people should… they are… those people are alive today, I think, because of the vaccine. I think that’s the truth.”
Trump seems to have grown more concerned about the potential threat of Kennedy pulling votes away from him, at least in key swing states. He also wrote at length attacking Kennedy on Saturday, calling it a “wasted protest vote” and claiming he’d rather have Biden than Kennedy. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s campaign previously claimed that the Trump campaign had approached them about a possible VP spot for Kennedy on Trump’s ticket — the Trump campaign has since denied this.
Watch the interview with Maher and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the video above.
