RFK Jr. slams Trump on COVID lockdowns at Libertarian Convention: 'He caved in'

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday addressed the Libertarian National Convention and excoriated former President Donald Trump over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“President Trump presided over the greatest restriction on individual liberties this country has ever known,” he insisted.

“I think he had the right instinct when he came into office. He was initially very reluctant to impose lockdowns… He caved in,” Kennedy said. “It all started with the social media and the mainstream media apparently without any government prompting began censoring any speech that departed from the government’s orthodoxies.”

“President Trump said that he was gonna run America like a business," he added. "And he came in and he gave the keys to all of our businesses to a 50-year bureaucrat who’d never been elected to anything and had no accountability." Kennedy appeared to reference Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Earlier in the speech, Kennedy highlighted the importance of the Bill of Rights to preserving individual liberty and lamented that prior American leaders had permitted the government to erode American rights.

"Everybody in this hall knows, governments don't like to limit themselves," Kennedy said. "The Patriots in 1791 vividly remembered the British tyranny and knew that every power a government takes... it will ultimately abuse."

"It's the Bill of Rights that earned America the reputations as the land of liberty. The problem is the Bill of Rights is only a document," he went on. "Our leaders have failed to respect it. Again and again, they've cited some pretext to suspend and violate our constitutional rights."

"Maybe a brain worm ate that part of memory... where there's an exception for pandemics," Kennedy quipped, referencing recent reports that doctors had found a worm in his brain during an exam years ago.

"The rights they give back are never quite as strong as the ones they take away," he added.

Kennedy had previously challenged former President Donald Trump to debate at the convention, though such a contest is not slated to occur. Trump will instead address the event on Saturday evening.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.