Since right-wing media’s early embrace of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a spoiler in the Democratic primary against President Joe Biden, Kennedy has become perhaps the most visible third party candidate in decades. 

The relationship soured when Kennedy filed as an independent, thereby also becoming a threat to the Republican ticket, and Fox coverage began tilting toward portraying him as a far leftist who could appeal to the left wing of the Democratic Party.

As Fox wrangles with the Democratic spoiler turned third-party threat it helped to create, the network is awkwardly trying to have it both ways. When network personalities are talking about Kennedy, he is a potentially fatal threat to Biden’s reelection. But when Kennedy appears for an interview, the conversation is dominated by right-wing talking points that could endear the candidate to Trump voters -- often at the direction of Fox hosts themselves.

Fox is effectively maintaining the lifeline it gave Kennedy’s candidacy during the Democratic primary, even at the potential risk of alienating Trump voters from Donald Trump, under the hope that more Biden voters will stray. 

“We have a, you know, a conservative base,” Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt knowingly said of her show during a recent interview with Kennedy. “They like where you stand on vaccines, men playing in women’s sports, immigration. What other conservative issues do you have that will appeal to those voters?” 

Kennedy denied seeing himself “as liberal or conservative,” but he did reply with a focus on the national debt, traditionally a right-wing media talking point (though he included Trump in his criticism). 

The next topic, introduced by co-host Lawrence Jones, was even more likely to endear Kennedy to the Fox audience: why he thinks Biden is a greater threat to democracy than Trump. 

“President Biden has done something no other president in history has done” in ordering social media platforms to “censor his political opponents,” Kennedy said. 

“If you have a president who can censor his political opponent, he has a license for any kind of atrocity. That is a genuine threat to our democracy,” Kennedy proclaimed, saying it’s a greater threat than what Trump “said about questioning the election and to the extent that he engaged in an effort to overthrow that.”

An earlier appearance on Jesse Watters Primetime went even easier for Kennedy, with host Watters simply providing the candidate with a platform to appeal to Fox viewers, with no discernible pushback on his liberal opinions Fox otherwise criticizes. 

“About half the country actually likes the guy,” Watters incredulously said as he introduced Kennedy, adding that a three-way debate between Kennedy, Trump, and Biden “could be the greatest television ever, besides Jesse Watters Primetime.” 

During the interview, Kennedy again stoked right-wing media grievances, even going so far as to compare the Democratic Party to the Soviet Union. 

Comparing his difficulties in campaigning for the Democratic primary nomination with efforts to remove Trump from 2024 ballots, Kennedy asserted that “the Democratic Party ought to stand for voting rights and encouraging as many people to vote as possible, and giving them as many choices” -- a shot at what he called “scurrilous or spurious legal action” against Trump.

Instead, he suggested, Democrats are acting like they’re “in the Soviet Union,” where “the political party would choose the candidates and you have these kind of these faux elections.”

Even when challenged on the liberal qualifications of his vice presidential nominee, Silicon Valley attorney Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy deflected by identifying his ticket with the political priorities of right-wing media. 

During Kennedy’s Fox & Friends appearance, co-host Brian Kilmeade pressed the candidate on his vice presidential nominee. 

“If you want to get Republican votes, why would your first major choice be someone who’s so identified with the Democratic Party?” Kilmeade asked the Kennedy family member.

Kennedy replied that “Nicole is engaged, or let’s say embarked, on the same evolution that many of us did,” like his “assumption that President Trump was wrong on the border, until I went down and saw the border.”

“A lot of us during COVID went through a philosophical evolution, where we started questioning some of the orthodoxies,” Kennedy reassured the audience, “and Nicole went through that herself.” 

Owing to her support for Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, a favorite target of right-wing media’s crime hysteria, Kilmeade asked, “Is she soft on crime?”

Once again, Kennedy replied with friendly messaging to the Fox audience: “Nicole funded the recall for [former District Attorney] Chesa Boudin, who was the defund-the-police guy in San Francisco.”

“She thinks that Gascon was a failure in Los Angeles,” he again reassured the audience, adding that she was simply concerned about high incarceration rates at the time but “her own attitude about it has evolved significantly.”

Unlike Kennedy’s fairly warm reception in interviews, other voices on Fox more stridently paint him as a “far left,” pro-communist outlier who could appeal only to the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Former Georgia Rep. Doug Collins commented that if Kennedy wanted to “split the parties,” then “he would have probably picked something closer to the middle” than Shanahan. 

“He did not, he went far left,” Collins said. She is “anti-police, she is anti-prosecution … . She is defund the police all the way,” he complained. 

Collins added that “Republicans have not focused on Kennedy,” predicting that “when the contrast comes up to Republican voters” between their values and his “pro-abortion,” “anti-police” ticket, his conservative appeal will diminish. 

On Fox & Friends, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered the kind of commentary Collins hoped for. The co-hosts discussed several of Kennedy’s affinities with conservative voters -- notably including COVID-19 controls and vaccines -- for Leavitt to smack down.

“If RFK Jr. pulls from the right at all, it’s probably simply because he is very much, in his own words, skeptical if not anti-vaccine,” said Fox contributor Johnny Joey Jones. “Trump sings a similar song” (Operation Warp Speed notwithstanding). 

Leavitt shot back that “it was Democrats like RFK Jr. and Joe Biden who pushed for the shuttering of businesses and schools” during the early pandemic, unlike Trump. “RFK Jr., at the end of the day, wants more government. He wants the government to control more aspects of Americans’ lives.”

“The polling does indicate that RFK Jr. hurts Joe Biden far more than he hurts President Trump, and it’s because RFK gives the far-left Democrats in this country another option,” she said earlier in the show, going so far as to accuse him of peddling “communism” in backing a national “smart grid.”