When Trump’s top health goon was tasked with answering for the president’s brutal immigration crackdowns, he placed the blame on the press for amplifying “Trump derangement syndrome.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted Friday on The Joe Rogan Experience that some of the scenes that came out of Minneapolis last month—namely the killing of two American citizens by federal agents—were “very disturbing.” But Kennedy faulted the media and “Democrats” rather than the administration that gave the orders for the Midwest operation.
“The thing that makes it most disturbing, is because there’s so much interaction with protesters, which is weird that the Democrats are telling protesters to go out there and stop law enforcement from doing its job,” Kennedy said to host Joe Rogan.
“That’s not how protests usually work,” he asserted. “If you don’t like US drug policy...you wouldn’t send people to try to interfere with people who are, who are uh, who are arresting a drug dealer. And when you have thousands and thousands of people doing that, there’s going to bethousands of interactions, and some of those are going to end badly because you have armed people doing dangerous things. And when you have crowds doing that, it’s going to blow up.”
Kennedy, 72, then alluded to how ICE operations in Minneapolis are winding down—after two deaths and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s bungled messaging.
“Nobody is happy with the way that things have looked, particularly in Minnesota, but a lot of it is because of this capacity of the press to take ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ and amplify it into public outrage and set up a situation,” Kennedy claimed.
ICU nurse Alex Pretti and unarmed mother Renee Good, both 37, were shot to death by federal immigration agents in two separate incidents in January. Their deaths were captured by numerous cell phone videos showing that neither were attacking officers when the shootings occurred. Still, following both of their killings, Noem and other administration officials referred to Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists.”
Kennedy went on to draw comparisons between the Trump administration’s deportation actions and those of former President Barack Obama.
“President Obama deported more people than President Trump did—the most in history,“ Kennedy said. ”Nobody cares." He went on to claim that 76 people were shot during the deportation process during the Biden administration and that “none of it made headlines.”
”About half of those people were killed. None of it made the news. Now, because it’s Trump doing it, you have the entire Democratic Party and the media establishment saying, ‘Oh, look at the horrible things. He’s a dictator.’ But he’s doing what he promised to do to the American people.”
For his part, Rogan also said some of the scenes came off as disturbing to people. But the podcaster and UFC commentator, who endorsed Trump in 2024, argued that they should also be disturbed by how some protests are organized. Rogan even questioned their legality.
“These protests are organized and paid for, and that’s crazy, right?” Rogan, 58, fretted. “When you find that out, and you find out that people can actually be paid to protest, and that they provide them with signs—they tell them what they do. It’s organized. They have signal chats.”
“There’s been a lot of people online talking about being paid to protest in certain places, and that’s kind of insane that that’s even legal—that you can organize a mob and pay them to go and make a bunch of noise," he said.
The concept of paid protestors has long been a point of fixation for MAGA. FBI Director Kash Patel claimed he would launch a probe into the funders of anti-ICE protests following the shooting of Renee Good in January. Later in that month, Trump repeatedly claimed the protesters in Minneapolis were paid agitators. Politifact reported that those claims made about paid protestors held up to scrutiny.
