RFK Jr. warns Biden isn't running the country after panned debate performance: 'It's scary'

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warned Friday that President Biden's poor showing at Thursday night's CNN Presidential Debate calls into question who's really running the country.

"He does not seem to be the person who's making the decisions in the White House," RFK Jr. told Lawrence Jones on "Fox & Friends" Friday. "I think our government is being run by anonymous men in lanyards, and it's scary."

Biden's performance against former President Trump in the first debate of the 2024 election cycle in Atlanta sent shockwaves across the Democratic Party as voters grow increasingly concerned about Biden's fitness for a second term.

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RFK Jr., who failed to meet CNN's requirements for the first debate, held a rival event instead where he answered the same debate questions in real time on X, formerly Twitter. 

He doubled down on the need for both candidates to answer to inflation, explaining how important it is to mitigate the housing crisis and make buying homes a reality again for young Americans. 

"This whole spectacle was a sad story for democracy," RFK Jr. said. "We have 341 million people in this country, and the two political parties produced two men who bickered over, really, irrelevancies without telling us how they're going to get our kids into houses. This is the first generation in American history who's going to be worse off than their parents."

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"I have seven kids. They all went to great schools. They all have good jobs, and none of them can get into homes," he continued. "My kids are very, very privileged compared to other children in this country. This is a crisis. The American middle class is the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind… it works because we had them in our homes. People could get equity. They were able to raise money. They were able to get it, borrow money to start businesses and pursue their entrepreneurial impulses. We're going from a society of owners to a society of renters, and this is a crisis for our country."

Meanwhile, Biden's rough performance has caused an earthquake across the media landscape, ranging from "dismal" reviews to vocal calls on the left for him to withdraw from the 2024 race. 

CNN's John King put a spotlight on the "very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party" that began in the early minutes of the debate.

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"This was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now," King said. "It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. And they‘re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket, and they‘re having conversations about what they should do about it."

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King's CNN colleague Kasie Hunt similarly wrote on X, "The voice, open-mouthed look, and visual contrast between President Biden and former President Trump all have Democrats I'm talking to nearly beside themselves watching this debate."

MSNBC host Joy Reid, one of the faces of the network's political coverage that unabashedly supports the president, bizarrely complained about how the Biden campaign made the fatal mistake of "putting him on the right" side of the stage.

"Why would you put him on the right?" Reid asked. "Because Biden likes to look over at the moderators and to look away. Had he been on the left, he would have been facing Donald Trump… He looked like he was looking off camera! Every decision they made exacerbated the problem!"

Fox News' Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.