Topic: 4 political family rifts ahead of the 2024 presidential election– Christian News 21 SEPTEMBER 2024 – Faithwheel.com
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4 political family rifts ahead of the 2024 presidential election
By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Saturday, September 21, 2024
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, the political polarization that has come to define American politics has extended into the families of the major candidates.
While relatives of presidential hopefuls often serve as powerful surrogates for their loved ones, they can also become top advocates for their family member’s opponents or emerge as one of their strongest critics.
Here are four political family rifts involving presidential candidates from the past and present that have emerged or intensified ahead of the 2024 election.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is from one of the most prominent Democrat legacy families in American politics, with a political pedigree dating back several decades to when his uncle, John F. Kennedy, was president of the United States and his father, Robert F. Kennedy, was U.S. Attorney General.
Kennedy campaigned as a Democrat for six months before launching an independent presidential bid in 2023.
Kennedy’s family members expressed their disappointment with his decision.
“The decision of our brother Bobby to run as a third party candidate against Joe Biden is dangerous to our country,” wrote Joseph Kennedy II, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Kerry Kennedy and Rory Kennedy in a statement.
“Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today’s announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.”
In August, Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump. By then, Biden had dropped out of the race, and Vice President Kamala Harris secured the Democratic nomination for president.
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Kennedy’s siblings Kathleen, Kerry, Courtney, Chris and Rory condemned his decision and expressed support for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in a statement posted on X.
“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride. We believe in Harris and Walz,” the statement reads.
“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
In 2023, before Harris selected Walz as her running mate, the Minnesota governor’s brother Jeff made a Facebook post reacting to Trump’s indictment, declaring, “We’ve just become a third world banana republic.”
Comments left on the post more than a year later, after Gov. Walz became Harris’ running mate, outline Jeff Walz’s disapproval of his brother’s ideology.
In response to a comment urging him to “have a talk with your brother,” Jeff Walz responded, “Haven’t spoken to him in 8 years.”
The vice presidential nominee’s brother added, “I’m 100% opposed to all his ideology” and lamented that “My family wasn’t given any notice [that] he was selected and denied security the days after.”
When another commenter asked Walz to “Get on stage with President Trump and endorse him,” he replied that he had no intention of doing so.
“I’ve thought hard about doing something like that! I’m torn between that and just keeping my family out of it. The stories I could tell. Not the type of character you want making decisions about your future,” he responded.
While Jeff Walz indicated in an interview with NewsNation that he did not intend for his comments to receive national attention, he stood by his analysis.
“It wasn’t my intent, it wasn’t our intent as a family, to put something out there to influence the … general public,” he said. “We’re not campaigning or anything for him or against him or anything like that.”
Jeff Walz clarified that the only reason he made the social media posts in the first place was to address “feedback from my friends, old acquaintances, thinking that I was feeling the same way that my brother did on the issues.”
In recent weeks, a photo of Walz’s distant cousins wearing shirts reading “Nebraska Walz’s for Trump” has made rounds on social media and was reposted by Trump.
Dating back to her uncle’s first presidential campaign in 2016, Mary Trump has become one of Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics.
She has founded a political action committee, Democracy Defense Fund, that works to support Democratic candidates in the 2024 election.
“As her uncle and his cronies spread the big lie and attempt to undermine our democracy, the Democracy Defense Fund will fight for and strive to secure our electoral system from the authoritarian traitors who seek to destroy it,” Mary Trump’s biography on the DDF website states.
She published a book ahead of the 2020 presidential election titled Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which the PAC maintains “exposed her uncle.”
Mary Trump’s X account contains multiple posts highlighting her distaste for her uncle.Play Video
In a Sept. 14 post, for example, she proclaimed, “Donald Trump is a domestic terrorist.”
In a post published Tuesday, one week after the former president’s debate with Harris, Mary Trump wrote: “Happy one-week anniversary to Donald for losing the debate against VP Harris so badly.”
“Yes, she won resoundingly, but he really, really lost — because he’s a loser,” she added.
While former President Barack Obama has been out of office for nearly a decade, he remains an important player in Democratic politics.
His brother Malik, on the other hand, has wholeheartedly embraced Trump.
Malik Obama’s 2020 book, Big Bad Brother From Kenya, details how the former president’s half-brother, who grew up overseas, “became a strong Trump supporter and Republican” with a “strong presence in the social media platform.”
The biography on Malik Obama’s X account includes the words “Trump” in all capital letters and “MAGA.”
In addition to supporting Trump, Malik Obama has also come forward as a staunch critic of his half-brother.
In a 2023 post on X, the former president’s brother explained that “I just wanted to be fake a— a snake’s (President Barack Obama)’s big brother but he rejected me.” He characterized his half-sibling as “fake as a snake” and a “TRAITOR” who “HAS SOLD HIS SOUL TO THE DEVIL.”
More recent social media posts from Malik Obama demonstrate his dislike of Harris.
He dubbed the presidential hopeful “‘ABORTION’ KAMALA HARRIS” because “THAT’s ALL SHE TALKS ABOUT.”
In a post published Thursday, Malik Obama wrote, “ALL THESE GREAT AND WONDERFUL THINGS KAMALA HARRIS SAYS SHE’S GOING TO DO, WHY HASN’T SHE DONE THEM THE FOUR YEARS SHE’S BEEN IN OFFICE? WHY?”
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