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Trump will give a speech at the Libertarian Party convention and attack Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump will speak at the Libertarian opposition party’s convention Saturday night, courting the favor of a segment of predominantly conservative voters often skeptical of the former Republican president while trying to ensure attendees do not gravitate toward independent White House candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Libertarian Party will choose its presidential candidate during a convention at a Washington hotel that ends Sunday. Kennedy, who ran in the Democratic primary before running as an independent, spoke at the convention on Friday but has indicated he has no interest in being the Libertarian Party’s nominee.

Polls have shown for months that most voters – even a majority of Democrats – do not want a rematch between Trump and Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020. That active could potentially boost support for an alternative such as the Libertarian candidate or Kennedy, whose candidacy has allies of both Biden and Trump worried he could be a spoiler.

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson won about 3% of the national vote in 2016, when Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in a close race. Party candidate Jo Jorgensen received just over 1% in the extremely close race between Biden and Trump in 2020.

Peter Goettler, president and CEO of the libertarian Cato Institute, said in a Washington Post column published this week that Trump’s speech at the Libertarian convention violated the convention’s core values ​​and that “the political party that claims to be libertarian has moved on to another identity.”

A libertarian candidate might try to win support from disaffected Republicans, but also from people on the left who reject the perceived power of government. These voters, too, might lean toward Kennedy.

The son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he sees himself as a truth-teller who has a long history of fighting for the middle class against powerful interests. He is also trying to win over conservatives who want Republicans nationally to turn away from Trump.

His anti-vaccine activism has appealed to some on the right who oppose a COVID-19 vaccination mandate. He has also suggested that some of the pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, may have been prosecuted for political reasons.

Trump had previously praised Kennedy and once considered him for a commission on vaccine safety, but now he has changed his tone. On social media, he said a vote for Kennedy would be a “wasted protest vote” and that he would “even prefer Biden Jr.”

Trump called the COVID-19 vaccine “one of the greatest miracles in the history of modern medicine.” But the former president now says that if he wins in November, he will not donate “a single penny” to public schools and universities that require COVID-19 vaccination. He also accused Kennedy of being a “fake” anti-vaxxer – efforts that could win him support from some of his supporters who might otherwise consider defecting to Kennedy.

In his own speech at the Libertarian Party convention on Friday, Kennedy accused both Trump and Biden of trampling on personal freedoms in response to the pandemic that encompassed their presidencies. Trump bowed to pressure from health authorities and closed businesses, he said, while Biden was wrong to mandate vaccinations for millions of workers.

Vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccine, have been proven sheltered and effective in laboratory tests and in real-world utilize in hundreds of millions of people over decades. The World Health Organization estimates that childhood vaccines prevent up to 5 million deaths each year.

While no medical procedure is without risk, doctors and researchers have proven that the risks of diseases in general are far greater than those of vaccinations.

An anti-vaccine group led by Kennedy has filed a lawsuit against several news organizations, including the Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking steps to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy left the group when he announced his run for president, but is listed in the lawsuit as one of its attorneys.

Biden, on the other hand, has boasted loudly that he has enlisted the support of numerous senior members of the Kennedy family to sideline RFK Jr.

The Biden-supporting advocacy group MoveOn Political Action is circulating a mobile poster at the Libertarian Opposition convention this weekend calling Kennedy an “extremist,” criticizing his differing positions on abortion, and arguing that a vote for Kennedy will ultimately lend a hand get Trump elected.

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