Great Speech from a Kennedy at the Republican National Convention

Leave a CommentGreat Speech from a Kennedy at the Republican National ConventionCommentary

RFK Jr. jokes about just how dramatically his political world has changed. “I’m 72 years old.” “And for 70 years of my life, I would have bet any amount of money that I would not be addressing a Republican convention.”

On the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walked onto a Republican stage in Dallas and tried to explain how a Kennedy ended up there.

He started with the obvious. At 72, he said he would have bet any amount of money he would never address a GOP convention. He grew up in the party of FDR, his uncle John, and his father Robert — tax cuts and a strong defense, cops and firefighters, free speech, Title IX, gold-standard science at NIH and CDC, and an alliance with Israel. That was the Democratic Party he thought he still belonged to.

The middle of the speech is his case that the party left those things behind. During COVID, he said, Democrats closed churches and left liquor stores open, censored doctors, shut businesses without a hearing, gave drug companies liability shields, and forced medical compliance while still calling themselves the party of “my body, my choice.” In one year, he claimed, they “obliterated 250 years of constitutional guarantees.” What held the coalition together after that, in his telling, was hatred of Donald Trump.

Then he told the story of the break. After the shooting in Butler, Trump called him. Kennedy said the man he met was not the one he had absorbed from television: serious about the Constitution, willing to take on industry, interested in drug prices, farmers, and public safety. He asked Kamala Harris for the same meeting. She didn’t take the call. No voter had ever cast a primary ballot for her, he said; “the party of No Kings simply anointed a queen.” On August 23, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.

That is why Kirk is at the center of the night. Kennedy said Kirk had spent nearly a year trying to get the two men together, and that the handshake, the endorsement, and the later work at HHS would not have happened without him. “Charlie Kirk built the bridge that President Trump and I walked across.” He told the room he likes to believe Kirk is looking down on the seeds he planted — the idea that people from different traditions could still find common ground in love of country.

He closed as both convert and cabinet secretary. Trump kept every promise he made to him, he said. Obesity is falling. Real food is back on the agenda. Drug prices are being forced down. The values he was raised on, he argued, now live in the Republican Party. If voters want that work to continue, they need to elect a Republican Congress.

Watch it for the family history, the long indictment of his former party, and the quiet center of the speech: a Kennedy thanking a dead organizer for getting two unlikely allies into the same room.