John F Kennedy's nephew is a presidential candidate who could win over Republicans and Donald Trump supporters, a leading US commentator has said.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the son of JFK's assassinated brother, announced in Boston on Wednesday that he would challenge President Joe Biden for the Democratic Party nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
Biden's predecessor Trump is expected to sweep the board in the Republican primaries — although he could be disqualified if convicted of the campaign finance charges brought by Democrat New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Nixon told Sputnik it would be a boon to the US if Kennedy overcame the odds to win the Democrat primary contest.
"If he was the nominee of the Democrat Party and Trump was the Republican nominee, I don't see how the country could lose," Nixon said. "Instead of the lesser of two evils would be the choice between which one's the better of two goods."
Kennedy was an opponent of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and of compulsory vaccination against the virus.
Nixon praised Kennedy's "respectful critique" of Trump's presidency which pointed out that while the former president publicly opposed the restrictions, "he still nevertheless enabled all the lockdowns and all the devastating damage."
"He said Trump's instincts were right, but he just went along with them with this monstrous, complete perversion of governmental power that undermined the most essential civil rights," the attorney said.
The fourth-generation heir to the Kennedy political dynasty also painted himself as a peace candidate — in contrast to Biden, who unilaterally altered the Afghan peace deal with disastrous results and has since embarked on a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
"He also talked about his uncle, JFK, and said that he felt that the measure of a president's greatness was whether they kept the country out of war, he said, as his uncle did," Nixon pointed out.
Even Kennedy's problems with spasmodic dysphonia, a medical condition that affects his voice "gives him a very, almost a sort of a, gentle and soft-spoken tenor where he couldn't stand up there and be a demagogue or shouting like you get Biden going off or even Trump."