RFK Jr Claims The Mainstream Media Brainwashed Him Into Thinking Trump Is Hitler
Boy, he must be really gullible, then!
One of the favorite apothegms of the Trumpist Right has been “I used to think Trump was a bad guy, too, because I believed the lies of the mainstream media — but then I listened to and read him for myself and changed my mind!” Most of the time this is absolute nonsense meant to make people question their own judgment and to portray themselves as shrewd, independent thinkers and Trump’s detractors as brainwashed followers of “whatever everyone else is saying.” Other times, it’s because they realized that their path to personal success involves taking a leap onto the Trump train and they have to justify their past comments about how he’s basically Hitler. See: JD Vance and basically every Republican who ran against him in 2016 and 2024 except for Chris Christie.
The latest member of this not-so-exclusive club, to no one’s surprise, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. CNN senior reporter Andrew Kaczynski recently unearthed multiple examples of Kennedy dragging Trump for filth, comparing him to Hitler, Mussolini, and other highly objectionable human beings, and calling his supporters “belligerent idiots” and “outright Nazis.”
“Like many Americans, I allowed myself to believe the mainstream media’s distorted, dystopian portrait of President Trump. I no longer hold this belief and now regret having made those statements,” he told CNN, without getting specific about what, specifically, he was wrong about.
At least he’s finally admitting that he’s incredibly gullible and willing to believe anything anyone tells him?
So yes — this would mean that while RFK Jr. has long had views far outside the mainstream concerning things like vaccines and fluoride, the mainstream media was able to compel him to believe that Trump was Hitler.
The curious thing about that, though, is that the vast majority of RFK Jr.’s criticisms do not seem as though they were based on any “distorted, dystopian” mainstream media portraits at all. Rather, it seems that he came by his assessment the normal way — by seeing Trump’s actions and listening to and reading his words and drawing conclusions from there.
For example!
In 2019, Kennedy argued that Trump had turned his first administration over to corporate lobbyists from industries they were supposed to regulate — industries that Kennedy would actually be able to regulate in some cases if confirmed as Trump’s HHS secretary.
So that is literally true — Trump specifically appointed people who opposed the agencies they were meant to head up. There’s not a special “mainstream media” spin to that, you either think it’s a good idea or you think it is a bad idea. I think it’s a bad one, and evidently, so did he at one point.
In another example, he specifically cites “statement[s] that Donald Trump makes” as opposed to “things that the mainstream media accused Donald Trump of saying that he would never, ever actually say.”
“And you can see that every statement that Donald Trump makes is fear-based,” Kennedy said on his radio show in December 2016. “Every statement he makes. You know, we have to be fear of the Muslims. We have to be fear of the Black people, and particularly the big Black guy Obama, who’s destroying this country, who’s making everybody miserable.”
“And only one person has the genius and the capacity to solve these things. And I’m not gonna tell you how I’m gonna do it. Just trust in me, vote for me and everything will be great again. And of course, that whole thing is like a carnival barker,” Kennedy concluded.
I look forward to RFK Jr. explaining that, actually, Donald Trump never said a bad word about Obama and that the mainstream media made all of that up, as well. Or that he has now decided that Obama is bad and was, in fact, born in Kenya. One of those two things!
The former environmental lawyer also criticized things Trump did, re: the environment.
He accused Trump of pursuing “pollution-based prosperity” by rolling back regulations like the Clean Water Act and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.
“Trump isn’t just gonna destroy the climate, but he’s also promised last week when he spoke to the oil industry, the shale gas industry, he promised that he would get rid of the Clean Water Act,” he added. “So he’s just gonna open the floodgates to every kind of pollution … Trump’s prosperity is gonna be pollution-based prosperity.”
Kennedy’s sharp criticisms of Trump extended into 2019, when he compared Trump’s EPA chief Andrew Wheeler to one of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” and called Trump’s efforts to boost fossil fuel production “despicable,” accusing him of knowingly prioritizing coal, oil and gas over the planet’s future.
Again, these are things that Trump did and said. They are not things that the mainstream media or anyone else made up.
Quite frankly, the only thing I can think of that could possibly be more exhausting than covering Trump would be having to make him up from whole cloth. Who could possibly even do that? Especially if he were actually going around being absolutely lovely all of the time and never doing anything horrifying (like, for instance, planning to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up Health and Human Services).
But if that is the case, I certainly hope that RFK Jr. will take the time to get to the specifics of what he was wrong about, as I’m sure we’d all love to be so enlightened.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
"My mistake was relying on my eyes ad ears, not on the reassuring words of President Trump."
So I assume his confirmation hearing will just be Democrats reading his many many many statements tearing into Trump? And then asking why he wants to work for Trump?