Note: Vicki and I watched this speech on YouTube last night. We both found it deeply moving, and I decided it was worth sharing the full text with my readers.
RFK Jr.’s Address to the RNC
September 10, 2026
Thank you. Thank you very much.
So 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. The irony of my presence here is inescapable.
I attended my first Democratic convention in 1960 when I was six years old, and I attended most of the conventions, the Democratic conventions, after that, and I spoke as a keynote speaker in many of them. I grew up in a Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt, of my uncle John Kennedy, of my father Robert Kennedy, and ours was a party of strong principles, of clear policies, and an inspiring, idealistic vision for democracy.
My uncle ran on a platform of tax cuts, strong defense, and fighting communism. Does that sound familiar? The Democrats of that era stood with labor and working people and the American middle class. Nearly every cop and firefighter was a Democrat.
Our party was a champion of the Bill of Rights, and particularly for unbridled free speech. It was wary of centralized government power, and corporate privilege, and secret intelligence agencies. My uncle and father understood the connection between free markets and functional democracy. They stood firmly against crony capitalism on the right, and socialism on the left. They were all for competition, for meritocracy, for the benefits of America, and for excellence, which they thought should be a universal aspiration for Americans.
My father and uncles had served in World War II, and they understood the difference between forever wars that they opposed and wars to protect our national security, which they believed we should never hesitate to defend. My family played critical roles in building NIH and the CDC into centers of gold standard science that transformed America into this relentless dynamo of international research. They promoted physical fitness, and they protected women’s sports.
My uncle, Ted Kennedy, wrote a book called The World’s First World War. He wrote Title IX, because he wanted to make sure that women, real women, were able to have a safe and guaranteed spot in college sports.
And they stood with Israel as the bulwark of democracy and as a beacon for press and religious freedoms, a haven from oppression to gays and women and ethnic and religious minorities amidst a regional sea of intolerance, of misogyny, of child marriage, of human slavery, and of ethnic and religious genocide. They saw Israel as America’s most critical front-line ally in fighting the toxic ideology of Islamism, which by its own accounts is waging an existential war against our country and against Western liberalism. It’s an ideology that has subjugated, impoverished, and tyrannized and tortured the people of Palestine and the people of Iran, and they openly promised to do the same to us.
Democrats opposed government coercion, defended individual rights, believed that government should give Americans information, good information, and then, like I said, let them trust them to make up their own minds. Democrats and labor leaders fought fiercely in my generation to stop illegal immigration at the border.
During COVID, I watched the Democratic Party turn against every one of its essential values, its principles, and all of the policies that define my party. Democrats turned away from gold standard research. They defended the industry-sponsored, agenda-driven science written by corrupt and captive regulatory agencies.
And the Democrats, which were once the champions of the American Constitution, systematically obliterated the Bill of Rights. And particularly beginning with the First Amendment, under the guise of combating misinformation, Democrats censored hundreds of scientists, scientists, and physicians who questioned the government’s dubious COVID pronouncements and orthodoxies. 37 hours after President Biden took the oath of office, he ordered Facebook and Instagram to remove my accounts in order to prevent public debate. I’m not complaining about what happened to me, but it was a bad thing for our country.
Democrats obliterated the second leg of the First Amendment, the right to the guaranteed right of assembly by social distancing regulations that were completely unscience-based. Democrats violated the third leg of the First Amendment, the freedom to worship. They closed every church in our country for a year. Who could imagine that would have happened? And they kept open the liquor stores and the big box stores as essential businesses.
Democrats torpedoed the Seventh Amendment right to jury trial by giving liability shields to the giant pharmaceutical companies. No matter how negligent they were, no matter how reckless, no matter how toxic the ingredients, no matter how grievous your injury, you could not sue them. Democrats violated the Fifth Amendment, by shutting down three million businesses with no due process and no just compensation.
Democrats shut down the Fourth Amendment, protection from unlawful searches and seizures, by forcing Americans to disclose their medical information before they could exercise their constitutional rights.
In a single year, my party obliterated 250 years of constitutional guarantees. The only bill of right that they left unscathed was the Second Amendment, and probably only because there is a Second Amendment.
The party of “my body, my choice”, forced citizens to wear masks and to submit to invasive and intrusive medical interventions against their own wills. The party of Me Too, remember that we were all supposed to listen to women and to believe women, a cruelly self-righteousness. They silenced the voices of tens of thousands of mothers who believed that their children had suffered vaccine injuries.
The Democrats declared war on women’s sports, effectively destroying Title IX. The Democrats condemned meritocracy openly and celebrated mediocrity. The Democratic Party became the party of elites, labeling working Americans as deplorables.
The Democrats cultivated deep ties with Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Food, Big Insurance, and the mainstream media. They embraced policies that divided Americans along racial lines. They abolished my uncle’s physical fitness test because they said that competition was bad for children.
The Democrats abandoned all of these values. And all of their traditional values, offering Americans only one policy.
The one policy that they stood for, the unbridled, sociopathic, and blind hatred of a single man, Donald J. Trump.
And they were so confident that Trump hatred alone was sufficient to win elections that they abandoned accountability and made our government a predatory organism, a monumental, inhumane bureaucracy.
The Democrats did the same thing, and that’s why they are these people who are being called out. The Democrats dismantled the public integrity safeguards and opened the floodgates to thieves and fraudsters who fleeced the American medical regulatory agencies for $100 billion annually during every year of the Biden administration. They somehow lost $360 billion. 60,000 children. And they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.
The Democratic Party, in short, lost its way. I mourn the fact that neither my father nor my uncle would recognize the Democratic Party of today. It struck me this was no longer about left and right, it was about sane and insane. It was about common sense and communism.
In April 2023, I ran for president, hoping to summons my party back to its bedrock values. But the Democratic Party had lost faith in American voters, and utterly, ironically lost faith in American democracy. They were convinced that they would lose the ballot box, they couldn’t win, and so they unveiled a lawfare strategy.
To prevent an election from occurring, they sued every candidate who dared to run against Joe Biden. And in an attempt to remove us all from the ballot, a lot of you think that the lawfare was just against Donald Trump. It was mainly against him, but they sued Dean Phillips, they sued Marianne Williamson, they sued Cornel West, they sued Donald Trump 50 times in 38 states to remove him from the ballot. And they sued me in 12 states to remove me from ballots where I had legally qualified.
And then, this is almost comical, after I endorsed President Trump and I tried to remove myself from the ballot so that he could have my votes, they sued me to keep me on the ballot. I’m not joking. Oh, here was the Democratic Party. They sued me.
And here’s the party that, in my youth, the biggest issue that we had, that my father and my uncle fought for, was voting rights and particularly in the Southern states to guarantee that every American had a right to cast a ballot. And here’s that same party 60 years later, using all of its ingenuity and all of its power to make sure that Americans could not vote for the candidates that they wanted to vote for.
They excluded me from the debates, they cancelled the primaries, the Democratic Party changed the rules to make sure I could not win and neither could the other people who were running as Democrats, no matter how many votes we got. And for the first time in history, they cancelled their own convention. No voter ever cast a primary ballot for Kamala Harris. No elected delegate was ever consulted.
A party of no kings simply anointed a queen, picked by secretive party elites who nobody even knows who they were. They’re just faceless guys with lanyards who are calling all the shots from the upper decks of that convention center, and nobody can see their faces any more than you can see the face of the people up there. But that’s who was making the decision. And then they cancelled the convention and they held a coronation.
The day that President Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, within three hours of his shooting, he called me and asked me for a meeting. And during the series of talks that followed, I realized that everything that I had heard about President Trump and everything I believed about him from the mainstream media was a lie. Everything.
I discovered a self-effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion, with an encyclopedic grasp of the issues in molecular detail, and most of all, a near reckless courage to challenge vested interests and official orthodoxies. I found a man who cared deeply about transparency in government, who believed in protecting free speech more than anything and the entire United States Constitution.
We talked about lowering drug prices, supporting farmers and ranchers, standing up for working Americans, restoring law and order, and protecting public safety and security, and national safety as well. We talked about ending official corporate influence. Unraveling. He wanted to end chronic disease. He wanted to restore our kids’ health.
He found it unacceptable that this country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden ever recorded. These conversations changed the course of my campaign and my life.
I realized that many of the foundational values of the Democratic Party had found a new home, and it was called the Republican Party. Out of a sense of fairness, after my conversation with President Trump, I tried to have the same conversation with Kamala Harris. You think she would agree to meet with me? Did she even pick up the telephone? No.
So, on August 23, 2024, I suspended my campaign, and I endorsed President Trump. Later that day, onstage at the Turning Point rally in Arizona, I met President Trump. And that moment would never have happened without my friend, Charlie Kirk.
Charlie played a critical and indispensable role at bringing me and President Trump together. In fact, it was something that I had never seen before. Thank you. He had been trying to do it for almost a year, the last year of my campaign.
And today, on the first anniversary of his assassination, I can’t stand here without thinking about him. Charlie believed that people from all different political traditions could find common ground in their love of country, that we were, in this age of algorithms driving us all apart and creating this terrible, destructive polarization, the only way that we were going to rescue our country is if we started talking to each other and having congenial conversations.
He helped build the bridge that President Trump and I walked across that day. And I like to believe that Charlie is looking down on all of us now and seeing the seeds that he planted.
That afternoon, President Trump and I stood together in front of thousands of Americans. We shook hands and we made a promise to the American people. Together, we promised to make America healthy again.
Some of my Democratic friends told me that I was a fool for trusting President Trump. And so I want to make the record clear right now. President Trump has kept every single promise that he made to me without exception. And we have kept our promise to the American people.
Today, two years into this administration, Americans are eating more real food. Real food sales were up 8% in 2025. Americans are eating less processed food. Since President Trump took office, obesity is down by 7% after 40 years of increasing.
And this is best of all. Preliminary data that I received two days ago from CDC indicates that we have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity. President Trump has ended nine wars. He’s restored competency to our government. He’s restored public faith. He’s restored America’s leadership across the globe.
And I am so grateful to God for giving our country a leader like this. And I’m grateful to President Trump for including me in his administration and giving me a place in this extraordinary revolution that is happening in our country where we’re going to restore American democracy and restore the America that my uncle and father believed in, the exemplary nation respected and emulated across the globe.
We are making America healthy again. It’s up to you now. We need to elect a Republican Congress to keep this momentum going. Let’s go out and do that.
God bless you. God bless America. Thank you all very much.
Why This Speech Works
The power of this speech begins with the man standing at the microphone. A Kennedy addressing a Republican convention is an argument before he says a word. He knows it. The audience knows it. His first task is to explain how he got there.
He does that by taking us back to a six-year-old boy attending the Democratic convention in 1960. This was his family, his childhood, the world in which he learned what public service was supposed to mean. When he talks about leaving the Democratic Party, he is talking about leaving home.
That is what gives the speech its weight. Kennedy presents his decision as a costly act of loyalty to the principles he inherited. The whole address grows out of that conviction.
Notice how carefully he builds it. Before criticizing today’s Democrats, he describes the Democrats he remembers: champions of working people, free speech, scientific integrity, physical fitness, national defense, and resistance to concentrated power. He establishes the standards first. Then he brings the charges.
And when he recalls his uncle’s support for tax cuts, strong defense, and fighting communism, he asks the Republican audience, “Does that sound familiar?”
That little question does a great deal of work. It invites the people in front of him to recognize themselves in the tradition he grew up in. He is giving them a share in his inheritance.
The family references matter throughout. “My father.” “My uncle.” These are figures the rest of us encounter in history books. For him, they are family. That does not settle every argument about what they believed, but it gives his account an intimacy that an ordinary campaign speech cannot manufacture.
Then the speech turns.
“Democrats” begins accusation after accusation. The repetition builds pressure. His verbs are hard: “obliterated,” “torpedoed,” “violated,” “shut down.” The portrait of a beloved party becomes an indictment of what he believes it has done.
The constitutional passage gives that indictment a structure. Kennedy moves through the amendments, connecting different grievances to a single charge: institutions entrusted with protecting liberty used their power to restrict it. A listener need not remember every example to remember the pattern.
Then comes the Second Amendment line. After all that tension, the audience gets a laugh. It is well placed. A speech cannot stay at full emotional volume indefinitely. Humor gives people a breath and brings them back.
Kennedy also knows the force of judging a party by its own words. “My body, my choice.” Believe women. Protect voting rights. “No kings.” He takes familiar Democratic commitments and asks whether the party has honored them.
For someone who once believed those promises, that question can hit harder than an attack from a lifelong opponent.
He keeps saying “my party.” Even in the middle of the indictment, he maintains the attachment. When he says he mourns what has happened, we understand the emotion he wants us to hear. There is anger, certainly, but the story underneath it is loss.
That prepares the encounter with Trump.
Up to this point, Kennedy has described institutions that disappointed him. Now he describes a conversation that surprised him. The speech becomes personal again. He meets a man he thought he understood and says he discovers someone very different.
His earlier opposition gives the testimony its intended force. The audience is hearing praise from a man who says he had every reason to withhold it.
More important to the story, the two men find something to do together. They talk about children’s health, food, chronic disease, farmers, and working Americans. The alliance acquires a purpose beyond winning an election.
Children’s health is particularly effective here. After the constitutional arguments and political battles, Kennedy brings the speech into the home. What are our children eating? Why are they sick? What are we leaving them?
Those questions connect the new alliance to the values he described at the beginning. The story starts coming together.
The tribute to Charlie Kirk deepens it. In Kennedy’s telling, Kirk helped make the conversation possible. He built the bridge the two men eventually crossed.
A bridge is a simple image, and the right one. It acknowledges a real distance between people while suggesting that the distance can be crossed. Kennedy’s remembrance gives the alliance an emotional obligation as well: someone helped bring this about, and those who remain have a responsibility to carry it forward.
There is a hard edge to the speech’s account of its opponents, and listeners will differ over how well that fits its appeal for conversation. But the bridge passage gives the address something it needs at that moment—a way forward after the long account of betrayal.
The ending is direct. Kennedy says the partnership has kept its promises. He returns to the America his father and uncle believed in. Then he hands the responsibility to the audience: “It’s up to you now.”
That is good construction. The speech begins with a question about his presence on that stage. It ends with a question about what the people listening will do next.
The emotional movement is clear all the way through: belonging, loss, confrontation, discovery, gratitude, purpose. Each stage prepares the next. The speech gives its audience a story to follow, with the policy arguments inside it.
And that explains why it can reach beyond the room. Many people know what it feels like to become estranged from an institution they once trusted. They remember what drew them to it. They still care about those things. They wonder whether leaving would mean betraying part of themselves.
Kennedy gives that experience a public voice. His answer is that principles can outlast an affiliation, and honoring them may require the courage to leave.
A man who begins by remembering where he belonged ends by explaining where he believes he can be useful. That is a story people will listen to—and remember.
