Read the full transcript of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech at a rally in Michigan on Friday, September 27, 2024.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Cost of Running for President
Well, I spent a lot of money on getting out of every state ballot in this country. We got a million Americans to sign their names to petitions. We built a network in every state in this country. The entire time, our polling and all the national polling was showing that the majority, about 57 to 60 percent of the people that wanted to support me, if I dropped out of the race, they said that they wanted to vote for Donald Trump.
So I was hurting Donald Trump. I was hurting the Republican Party. But the Republican Party did nothing to stop me from getting on any ballot. Republican Donald Trump was critical of me in a way that was congenial, that was respectful, and was kind, but he did nothing.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party spent tens of millions of dollars to defame me, to publish perjuries against me, to publish fake news against me, to marginalize me, to make me look like a crazy person. And they spent tens of millions of more dollars to get me out, to make sure I could not get on those state ballots. All the pundits from the beginning said, “Gee, we’ll never get on those state ballots.” But we did it, despite those tens of millions of dollars that attorneys sued us and all the states to make sure we couldn’t get on.
The Democratic Party sued me to keep me off the state here in Michigan, off the ballot. And the day that I announced for Donald Trump, they pivoted and sued me to keep me on the ballot. And so far, they’ve won that lawsuit. So my name is going to appear on the Michigan ballot.
A Change of Heart
But I don’t want you to vote for me. I want you to vote for Donald J. Trump, because that’s the only way that I’m going to get to Washington, D.C., and do all the things to help end the war, to end the chronic disease epidemic, to end the censorship, to end the surveillance, and all the other things that I entered this race to do. I’ve been a Democrat my whole life.
And I heard all of the descriptions of MAGA during the 2016 election. And I bought into a lot of them. And then one day, I heard Hillary Clinton criticize Tulsi Gabbard for being a communist, a Russian plant, Tulsi Gabbard, who put her life on the line again and again for this country in military service, something that Hillary Clinton never did. And I began to have doubts about what I was being told about MAGA.
And when President Trump got elected, I said 80 million people voted for him. How can we dismiss 80 million of our fellow Americans as deplorables? I don’t want to work in Washington, D.C. I have a good job. I have a great life. But I want to help these kids so that we can end the chronic disease epidemic. And I went to President Trump, and I said to President Trump, “If you want my help, I am here to do it.” And we worked together for a while.
Understanding MAGA
But I started to understand that MAGA, you know, for most Democrats, MAGA, Make America Great Again, means going back to the 1950s. And they say it’s racist because we didn’t have civil rights in our country at that time for black Americans. They say it’s dictatorial and it’s against freedom of speech because that was the era of Joe McCarthy. And they say it’s isolationist and retrograde.
But the more that I get to know you and the more that I get to know Donald Trump, I understand what MAGA really means. And I asked Donald Trump about what he thought MAGA meant, what era we were going to make America great again. And he said, “The era of your uncle, John F. Kennedy.”
That was the era when America was at its apex, here and abroad. We were the wealthiest country in the world. We owned half the wealth on the face of the earth. The American middle class was the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind.
We had a robust union movement that was making sure American labor had dignity and good jobs. We had virtually every American believed in the accessibility of the American dream, which meant at that time that if you worked hard, if you played by the rules, you could afford to buy a home. You could take a summer vacation. You could raise a family and you could put something aside for your retirement on a single job.
The American Dream: Then and Now
There’s no American now in my kids’ generation who believes that that contract applies to them. This is a demoralized generation. In 2013, there was a poll in which Americans under 35 were asked, “Are you proud of the United States of America?” And 85% of them said yes. The same poll taken six months ago, only 17% said yes. We have an entire generation that is alienated, that is disaffected, that has lost hope for their own futures and has lost their pride in our country. And to me, that was one of the most tragic data points that I learned about in this election.
We have kids, the greatest asset that I had as a boy was this intense pride that I had about the United States of America. And we were at that time a moral authority around the world. The people all around the world wanted to be in America. They looked to us for leadership. They knew the difference between leadership and bullying. They didn’t want us making wars.
John F.
Kennedy’s Legacy
My uncle was asked by one of his best friends, “What do you want on your gravestone?” And he said, “He kept the peace.” He said that the primary job of a president of the United States is to keep our country out of war. He said that he didn’t want African children and Latin American children and Asian children, when they heard about the United States of America, to think of a man with a gun. He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer. He wanted them to think of the Kennedy Milk Program, which gave nutrition to tens of millions of hungry children around the world.
He wanted them to think of USAID and the Alliance for Progress that put America on the side of the poor, not just in this country, but all around the world. And those are the same ambitions that Donald Trump has. Today, my uncle kept any American soldier during his term in office from ever going to die in combat. Today, as a result of that commitment, there are more statues to John Kennedy, more boulevards named after him, more avenues, more universities, more hospitals in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and any other U.S. president, and probably more than all other presidents combined. And that is a good foreign policy, to have the world love us. Don’t you want a foreign policy where the rest of the world loves and admires the United States of America? And when he says, “Make America great again,” that’s what he’s talking about.
The Importance of Personal Virtue
And one of the things that we learned at home is that we not only have to be virtuous as a nation, we have to be virtuous as individuals. We had to, for example, tell the truth when we did something wrong. So one time I hit a baseball through my mom’s window and broke it. And my dad said to me, “Before you answer this question, I want you to remember what George Washington did. He cut down the cherry tree.” This is a story every American knew at that time. His father asked him who cut it down, and he said, “I did.” He always admitted when he was wrong.
And now the Democratic Party has given us a loophole around that mandate. All you have to know is seven words, and you never have to admit to doing anything wrong again. And do you know what those seven words are? “I was born in the middle class.”
So repeat after me, “I was born in the middle class.” So the next time your boss asks you why you were late for work, what are you going to say? And the next time your wife asks you why you didn’t take out the garbage, what are you going to say? And the next time your landlord asks you for the rent check, what are you going to say?
That’s all you have to know, and you don’t have to answer any questions. And we know why she didn’t want to answer that question, because there’s no good answer to it.
Economic Comparison: Trump vs. Biden
By every indication in which we measure the welfare of our economy, the Trump administration excelled and the Biden-Harris administration has failed us. Inflation on average during the Trump administration was held under 7 percent. Now it’s at 20 percent. Gross rents have almost doubled, mortgages have more than doubled in just three and a half years. Groceries have gone up, gasoline has gone up, electricity has gone up, health care has gone up. Do you know the only thing that’s gone down? Wages.
So that is not a success story, and I don’t blame her for not wanting to answer that question. It was a question that was almost impossible for her to answer, impossible for her to answer truthfully and still walk out of that debate.
The Democratic Party: Then and Now
So the Democratic Party that I grew up with, the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, of Robert Kennedy does not exist today. This was the party of peace. Today it’s the party of war. And we saw President Zelensky come over here. I was so proud of President Trump today, who did a press conference with Zelensky. And the Democrats had their own press conference, and you know what he got them to do? He got them to sign artillery shells. These are artillery shells that are going to be dropped on women and children.
And he got them to sign something else, an $8 billion additional check. Oh, you think we could use that money over here in this country? This was a war that we were lied to from day one. We were told that it was an unprovoked invasion. We were told, we weren’t told that Vladimir Putin and every other Russian leader told us for 30 years, “If you go into Ukraine, we’re going to have a military reaction. It is a red line for us.”
The Ukraine Conflict
Ukraine has a 2,200-mile border with Russia. They’ve been invaded three times through Ukraine. Last time, Hitler killed one out of every seven Russians. If we put Aegis missile systems in Ukraine, like we’ve done in Romania and Poland, which they also told us don’t go in there, those missiles, Tomahawk missiles, which can be nuclear-tipped, will be three miles from Moscow. We could decapitate the entire Russian leadership in three minutes.
My uncle, when the Russians tried to put missiles in Cuba, was going to go to war. And if Putin tried to put missiles in Canada or Cuba or Mexico, we would go to war. So we had to expect that they would do exactly what they told us we were going to do. And if you go into Ukraine with NATO, we’re going to go to war. And two days before the invasion, Kamala Harris went to Germany and said definitively, for the first time by any U.S. leader, “We are moving NATO into Ukraine.” And that is something that we all need to understand, that provocation.
And I was so proud of President Trump, because everybody says that he alienates people all over the world. He doesn’t know how to be a diplomat, but he was the epitome of diplomacy. And I urge you to go look at the YouTube. He was kind and civil to President Zelensky. He was also firm in his resolve, and he said, “I’ve had a nice meeting, but I have not changed my mind. We need a peace, and we need to do it very quickly.”
Protecting U.S. Interests
And we need to protect U.S. interests, not an interest of a country in which we have no strategic interests and no treaty. And he was polite, he was kind, but he was firm in protecting our country. And that’s what Donald Trump will always do.
And it was especially impressive to me, because I know what Donald Trump was thinking while he was having that meeting. He was thinking, “I want to turn this guy over and hold him by his legs and shake all the money out of his pockets, and I hope it adds up to $208 billion, because that’s what we get, that’s what the Democrats gave him.” And we need to bring that money home and spend it here on our communities. Don’t you think you deserve a president who is going to make peace with the world, who is going to protect economic power abroad?
They say he’s an isolationist, he isn’t. He wants to make deals, he’s a dealmaker. He wants to make deals with China, but not the old kind of deals that benefited only China. He wants to make deals that are going to benefit everybody.
He wants to make deals with Russia, the kind that will bring the world into a peaceful economic growth and a boom for all nations. This is what he says again and again. He’s not a tyrant, he’s not a monster. He just wants the best for the United States of America.
Freedom of Speech and Democracy
The Democratic Party that I grew up with was the party of constitutional rights, of civil rights, and particularly the right of freedom of speech, which my uncle and my father treasured. He thought this is the basis, a fundamental bedrock of American democracy is the free flow of information, and when government gets involved in censoring information, that is the beginning of totalitarianism. We know this because we read Orwell and Aldous Huxley and Robert Heinlein and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Arthur Koestler when we were growing up, and that was the lesson that was repeated in civics lessons again and again. One thing that you never allow a government to do is to censor speech of any kind.
And if you do that, it is the first step down the slippery slope of totalitarianism. So the Democrats are trying to say that Donald Trump hates democracy and he wants to be a dictator, but they’re all advocating now, openly advocating the censorship of our speech. What they say is, “Well, we don’t want to censor all speech, just the lies.” They want to determine what’s the truth and what’s a lie.
And who was the biggest perpetrator of lies during the COVID epidemic? It was the government itself. They were the ones promoting disinformation and misinformation. I saw this week, Hillary Clinton, Tim Walz, and Kamala Harris all using the same talking point, that the next administration is going to get rid of misinformation and disinformation because that is not protected by the First Amendment.
Well, it is. The First Amendment protects lies the same as it protects speech of truth. The First Amendment was not written to protect the kind of speech that we all want to hear. It was written for hard times, to protect the speech that nobody wants to hear.
And that is the fundamental foundation stone of democracy, that everybody gets to say, to have their own truth. And as Louis Brandeis said, the remedy for bad speech is not censorship, never. That turns to totalitarianism. The remedy for bad speech is more speech.
And that’s something that Donald J. Trump understands because he’s been censored himself. And he understands it very acutely. He’s seen the weaponization of the federal agencies to silence him, to destroy the electoral process, as they did to me.
The State of Democracy
The Democratic Party has not had an election. They’re saying that he’s destroying democracy. But they felt the need to destroy democracy in order to save it. It would not let me participate in the primary.
And Kamala Harris never got a single primary vote. We don’t know who appointed her. And that’s not democracy. President, don’t you want a president who believes in democracy?
Don’t you want a president who wants to see the censorship ended in this country? Don’t you want a president who’s going to end the surveillance state and make our country the beacon of freedom around the world once again?
The Changing Face of Political Parties
And the party that I grew up in was the party that was very skeptical of the corporate control of American democracy. Republican Party was the party of corporate control.
The Democrats were on the side of working people, of the poor, of the cops, the firefighters, labor unions. And today, there’s been an inversion. During the 2020 election, roughly 50 percent of people in this country supported the Democratic Party, and roughly 50 percent supported the Republican Party. But the 50 percent who supported the Democratic Party owned 70 percent of the wealth in this country.
The 50 percent who supported Donald Trump owned 30 percent. As Charlie Kirk said to me the other day, Donald J. Trump chased the billionaires out of the Republican Party.
The Democratic Party today is the party of big pharma, big tech, big ag, big food, the military-industrial complex, and Wall Street. Look at the people who are pouring money into the Harris campaign. This is why they’ve collected two to three times more money than Donald Trump. They have all the money on their side.
We have the people. And don’t you want a president of the United States who, instead of outsourcing U.S. jobs and manufacturing capacity abroad to China and to Latin America and to other countries, is going to get other countries to outsource their manufacturing and jobs to Michigan, like this, like the hawks that we’re standing in now?
Border Security and Immigration
And don’t you want a president who is going to protect our border? Raise your hand if you think it’s a good idea that the Mexican drug cartel, the Sinaloa cartel, is now running U.S. border policy. That’s not good for our country. Do you think that’s good for our country?
It’s terrible, and it’s terrible for working people. In the last 10 years of his life, I worked very, very closely with Cesar Chavez, who was a very close political ally and personal friend of my father. During that—and I was a pallbearer at his funeral in 1993—but during that period, I was working with him on pesticide issues, because Hispanic farm workers, 15,000 of them are poisoned, many of them killed by pesticide exposures every year, and their families are devastated. Cesar Chavez’s other big issue was closing the U.S. border, because he understood—and I was at the border many times.
The first time, I went down between 2 o’clock and 3 o’clock, and I saw there were 27 gaps in the wall that were left by the Biden administration when they shut down construction the day they came into office, and all the material that we’ve already paid for is sitting right next to those gaps in the wall. They could easily rebuild them right now. President Harris said, “There’s nothing I could do.”
Yeah, there is. You could just finish the wall. And when I was down there at 2 o’clock in the morning, it looked like the start of the Boston Marathon. There were people, humanity, pouring across, and the Border Patrol, their job had been repurposed from protecting our borders, escorting people to the Yuma Airport, and sending them to any destination in our country.
It’s the most insane thing I’ve ever seen, and it’s crushing the social safety net in our country. And the reason Cesar Chavez wanted to close the border is he saw that all these illegal migrants who were coming across were destroying his capacity to negotiate for good working conditions and good wages for his American workers. And that was obvious at that time, not only to Cesar Chavez, but the entire Democratic Party today, because President Trump said we need to close the wall. That’s the only thing that they hear.
If Trump says it must be wrong, so now we’re up for an open border. Don’t you want a president who is going to reassert control of the U.S. government of our immigration policy?
Women’s Rights and Sports
And, you know, my uncle Ted Kennedy, who was 50 years in the United States Senate, he wrote a law called Title IX. And that law, and he got Republicans and Democrats to support it, but that law created equality in women’s sports because he said women ought to be allowed to compete and they ought to have the same rights as men to compete. And that’s something the Democratic Party believed in, but they don’t believe in it anymore. Now they’re against women’s sports.
Health and Well-being of Americans
And finally, the Democratic Party that I grew up with wanted to protect the most vulnerable people in our society. They wanted good health for our children. And today the Democratic Party is on the side of the big ag, big pharma, and big food companies that are poisoning our children. We now have the highest chronic disease rate in the world, diabetes, which was virtually unknown when I was a kid. An average pediatrician in my day, when I was a kid, when my uncle was president, would see one case of diabetes, juvenile diabetes, in his lifetime, 40 or 50 year career.
Today one out of every three children who walk through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic. And it’s costing us more than our military budget, just that kind of mitochondrial disorder. This is bankrupting. When my uncle was president, we spent zero on chronic disease. Now we spend $4.3 trillion.
Our children are so sick and so obese, that 77% of them do not qualify for military service. Our fertility levels have dropped to the lowest in the world. Teens today have 50% of the sperm count, 50% of the testosterone as teens, American teens two generations ago.
Little girls are now hitting puberty at eight years old because of all the estrogen that is generated by the poisons and toxic foods. We have a thousand ingredients in our foods that are illegal in Europe. And the same companies, Kellogg and all these companies, are making products in Europe, and they don’t use those ingredients there. So they know how to do it, but they’re poisoning Americans when they know how to not poison Canadians or Europeans or Mexicans.
And the average girl in this country is now reaching puberty between 10 and 13 years old. That’s six years younger than a couple generations ago, and it is the youngest of any nation in the world. We are destroying our children, and that was the major reason. His commitment, Donald Trump’s commitment, to make America healthy again is the primary reason that I joined this campaign.
And don’t you think that we want a president in this country that is going to make our country healthy again? Thank you all very much, and God bless you, and get to the vote, the poll on November 5th here in Michigan. And don’t vote for me, vote for Donald J. Trump.
