Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reflected on his evolving relationship with President Donald Trump during an interview, in which he mused on the path that brought them from political rivals to close allies.
During an appearance on the Tucker Carlson Show this week, Kennedy elaborated on the unlikely partnership that sparked when the two men were on the campaign trail last year competing to become the country’s next president ahead of the 2024 election.
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Kennedy, who ran first on a Democratic platform and later as an independent candidate, told host Tucker Carlson he initially viewed Trump as a “one-dimensional character … kind of a bombastic narcissist.”
But since suspending his presidential campaign to endorse Trump last August and subsequently forming a burgeoning alliance with him centered on the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Kennedy’s perspective on the president has changed as he has entered Trump’s inner circle. Kennedy now describes Trump as “an encyclopedia,” “multidimensional,” “thoughtful,” and “one of the most empathetic people I’ve ever met.”
“All of us, we’re all flawed characters in one way or another, but I think he’s really a uniquely right person for this country right now because we were in a death spiral, and not only morale but also just … who could ever would you believe we’d ever have a president in our lifetime that would actually be addressing the costs of government in a dramatic way?” Kennedy told Carlson, adding that he views Trump as someone with the singular capacity for “making people feel good about being American.”
“Whatever you think about him, there’s a new feeling in America now that we’re back on the upswing again — as he says, ‘The country is hot again,’ you know. And all around the world, people see that too,” Kennedy added.
As he reflected on what surprised him about Trump on Monday, Kennedy described the president as a fervent populist who cries to renowned opera singer Pavarotti in private.
“You know, the Democrats have him pegged as a guy who’s sort of sitting, you know, in the Cabinet meeting talking about, ‘How can we make billionaires richer?’” Kennedy said. “He’s the opposite of that. He’s a genuine populist.”
“The most surprising thing is that I had him pegged as a narcissist, when narcissists are incapable of empathy, and he’s one of the most empathetic people that I’ve met,” he added. “You notice whenever he talks about the Ukraine war, he always talks about the casualties on both sides. Every time he talks about it, I’ve noticed that, and he does that in every theater. He talks about how human beings are affected by it. Whether it’s vaccines or Medicaid or Medicare, he’s always thinking about how this impacts the little guy.”
During Trump’s first term, Kennedy said he felt betrayed when the president asked him to chair a study on vaccine safety, only to hear that the White House appeared to backtrack on the alleged promise. Kennedy later blamed the apparent reversal on the Trump administration’s hiring of “pharmaceutical lobbyists who are very pro-vaccines” to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other healthcare-related agencies.
“The president likes to say ‘policy is personnel.’ Well, he put in those positions personnel that represent the policies that he wants, which is very, very pro-pharma agenda, I’m sorry to report,” Kennedy told the Connecticut Vaccine Science Forum in 2019.
Years later, Trump came out hard against Kennedy as he emerged as a possible third-party vote splitter during the 2024 election. The president threw his traditional, rambunctious attacks against his then-political rival, describing Kennedy as “fake,” a “Democrat ‘plant’” and a “radical-left liberal.”
During his 16 months on the campaign trail, Kennedy, for his part, ran a campaign that steered away from personal attacks, instead focusing on promoting an idealistic vision dedicated to ending polarization in the highest echelons of power and stamping out the “the hatred, the fear” and the “darker angels” in U.S. politics. His promises emphasized tackling chronic diseases and dismantling what he saw as rampant conflicts of interest between government agencies in charge of health policy and the pharmaceutical industry.
However, there was also deep criticism from the Kennedy campaign over how Trump handled the COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out during his first term in office.
“With lockdown, mask mandates, the travel restrictions, President Trump presided over the greatest restriction on individual liberties this country has ever known,” Kennedy said at the Libertarian National Convention in May.
But later that fall, the two men set aside their differences for an alliance that shocked the political establishment. Kennedy was facing myriad obstacles as a third-party candidate in a two-party system, and Trump had survived an assassination attempt that he said reshaped his worldview, telling Kennedy that he wanted tackling chronic disease to be “his legacy” if he won a second term.
Talks between the two men ended in Kennedy’s decision last August to suspend his presidential campaign and endorse Trump.
“Ultimately, the only thing that will save our children and our country is if we choose to love them more than we hate each other,” Kennedy said last fall.
The onetime Democratic candidate has since emerged as the premier voice on health policy in the Trump administration, initially influencing the president through the pair’s “unity government” before ascending to head the country’s most powerful federal health agency.
And along the way, Kennedy has strengthened his personal relationship with Trump.
“What I’ve been surprised by in getting to know him is what a kind of deep, multidimensional, and thoughtful character he is and how well I also thought, ‘Oh, he doesn’t read’ and ‘He’s not interested in anything,’” Kennedy told Carlson. “[But] he’s immensely curious, inquisitive, and immensely knowledgeable. He’s encyclopedic in certain areas that you wouldn’t expect, like music. And he gets very emotional about music. He knows the whole story behind every song; he cries when he hears Pavarotti.”