Transcript - America This Week, April 5, 2024: “The Nine Billion RFK Answers Ignored”

If CNN spends an hour interviewing Robert F. Kennedy and doesn’t hear his answers, did it happen? Walter and Matt discuss. Plus “The Nine Billion Names of God.”

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how’s it going?

Walter Kirn: It’s going well. I’m in Montana. I’m preparing to travel to New York where I will be for the great solar eclipse on New York City. My wife’s not particularly happy. She thinks that if civilization disintegrates, it’ll be a hard walk back to Montana for me. But I’ve always-

Matt Taibbi: Or from the afterlife?

Walter Kirn: Or from the afterlife. Well, I don’t want to tell her that that’s a possibility because then she won’t let me go at all, because I’ve been reassuring her that should I have to walk back from New York City, I’m prepared. In fact, I’ve been preparing all my life for a trek like that.

Matt Taibbi: Who was the guy, Plennie Wingo, who walked backwards from San Diego to Istanbul, basically?

Walter Kirn: Wow.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, he made it to the steamer in New York, and then got to Europe and then walked backwards all the way there, and he was one of my heroes growing up. He just did that.

Walter Kirn: Do you have to keep walking while you’re on the steamer? Do you have to stay in motion for that record?

Matt Taibbi: No, no. I don’t know what he did exactly.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: That part of the legend escapes me, but he did walk quite a fair distance backwards, and it’s the Animal House thing. This calls for a stupid pointless gesture, but to really commit to it, I really appreciate that. Well, this wasn’t, I would say, the most dynamic news week, although there is an issue that has been bouncing around quite a lot. Unfortunately, some of this, it got on me, partly due to my own fault because I posted something on Substack. But the main outlet for it was an interview that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave on CNN to Erin Burnett, and we thought it would be instructive to go through that interview stage by stage, because there’s so much in it that describes modern American politics.

But just to give everybody a sense of what the controversy is, essentially, RFK said that he considered Joe Biden a worse threat than Donald Trump. And as you can see, this led to consternation everywhere. Everybody’s doing front-page stories about it, and there was a great gnashing of teeth and, “How could you possibly say that?” That sort of thing. If we feel like getting into it, the view really flipped out about that, although they’ve been flipping out about RFK for a while.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how did you first hear about this story?

Walter Kirn: I’m not sure. Probably like I hear about every story, someone sent it to me, but I’ve been following his candidacy for a while and that he was on CNN, and it all surprised me that they gave him this much time. It’s quite a long interview.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, that’s an interesting issue, isn’t it? We should maybe discuss why that’s the case at some point.

Walter Kirn: Maybe they simply wanted to give him enough time to launch a soundbite that they could use against him. Who knows? But they did have a fairly generous interview, though it was adversarial in the extreme, I thought.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, to say the least. So let’s start at the beginning here, and the opening question from Erin Burnett, and lest anyone forget, Erin Burnett came to television by way of Goldman Sachs.

Walter Kirn: I didn’t know that.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, so the composition-

Walter Kirn: What did she do for Goldman Sachs? Does anybody know?

Matt Taibbi: God, I don’t even remember. I don’t think it was comms, though. I think she was actually in finance, if I remember correctly. But in any case, the composition of people on television is increasingly limited to people who’ve either droned somebody to death or ripped them off in a mortgage scam. So Erin Burnett is going to give this interview to RFK Jr. and here’s where it starts.

Erin Burnett: Mr. Kennedy, I appreciate your time. So you’re Jeff Zeleny going through the role that Jill Stein played. When you just look at the vote tallies in the State of Wisconsin, only need 2,000 votes to get on the ballot in the State of Wisconsin. So what do you say to Democrats who point to Jill Stein and say, “That’s going to be you?”

RFK Jr.: Well, right now-

Matt Taibbi: I’m sorry. Can we just pause there for a second? To start an interview with, “What do you say to people who say you’re just Jill Stein?” What do you think about that as an opening question, Walter?

Walter Kirn: Well, no one said it but her, first of all. I love how they abstract their particular questions to the polity at large. If you go down to the cafe, people are saying, “Hey, isn’t this Kennedy just like Jill Stein?” Not, but she seems nervous starting the interview, she wouldn’t look him in the eye at first. And then she said, “It only takes 2,000 votes to get on the ballot there.” She didn’t mean votes, she meant signatures. So she’s clearly preparing for a got you session, and she tried to throw him off instantly with this comparison that everybody/nobody is making.

Matt Taibbi: And by the way, this is something that also happened to Coleman Hughes last week on The View where he was in an ambush interview that he knew was an ambush interview, but there was a scene where Sonny Hostin says to him, “What do you say to your critics who would say that you’re co-opted, a charlatan and a pawn?” Essentially, she’s calling him, “What do you say to your critics who are essentially calling you an Uncle Tom like I am right now?” And when you ask a question like that, is that even really a question? I don’t even know because if there’s no actual person who said that...

Walter Kirn: In that, it has a question mark or a rising tone on the last word or two, but this is how it works now, put somebody at a disadvantage and throw them into a hole and watch them try to crawl out of it. That used to come at the halfway mark of an interview maybe, or toward the end, but now it’s the very beginning.

Matt Taibbi: Right. So let’s just listen to a little bit of his initial response here.

RFK Jr.: I don’t know what I’m going to do, who I pull more from in November. Right now, I’m pulling pretty much equally, probably a little more from President Trump. As you pointed out, I want to pull from both of them, but do you want a glib answer, a thoughtful answer?

Erin Burnett: I’d always prefer thoughtful.

RFK Jr.: Okay. What I would say is you have both sides using scare tactics. Republicans say that, “If Joe Biden gets in, it’s going to be the end of the Republic.” Democrats say, “If Donald Trump gets in, it’s going to be the end of democracy.” And I don’t think either of them are actually going to destroy democracy.

Matt Taibbi: So he goes on from there, but what do you think of that? That’s a very sensible answer, right? It’s a non-alarmist answer. “I think we’ll survive. We have durable institutions,” he goes on to say, but this only seems to make her angrier, and we end up in a place. Let’s see if we can... Go ahead.

Walter Kirn: Well, I loved how she said she’d always prefer a thoughtful answer when her question wasn’t thoughtful, but he didn’t even address the Jill Stein thing. He didn’t go for it. He didn’t take the bait.

Matt Taibbi: And good for him.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And I guess that all has to do with the legend that Jill Stein lost Hillary Clinton Wisconsin rather than her not ever campaigning in the state.

Matt Taibbi: Right. And let’s forget about the fact that subsequently, Jill Stein and the Green Party were hideously mistreated, denounced as agents of Russia just for running. The Green Party historically has run into all kinds of problems just trying to get onto the ballot. But no, the question is, “Are you Jill Stein? Are you going to be a spoiler?” And you can see that it’s on the Chiron and take away Joe Biden’s ability to win the election. So she goes on and after he delivers his thoughtful answer, which goes on for quite a while, this is the question that comes after that.