FULL: RFK Jr. speech at 2026 RNC Midterm Convention
What this video covers
Kennedy, roughly two years into his tenure as HHS Secretary, delivers a full address to the Republican National Committee’s 2026 midterm convention in Dallas, speaking on the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The speech is his fullest account of his break with the Democratic Party of his father and uncle: he argues the party abandoned its own values during COVID, recounts how his alliance with President Trump formed, credits Kirk with brokering it, and closes with claimed early results for the MAHA agenda and a pitch to elect a Republican Congress.
Key points
- Kennedy opens by saying that at 72, having attended his first Democratic convention in 1960 at age six and keynoted many since, he would have bet any amount of money he would never address a Republican convention. He describes the old Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy as the party of tax cuts, a strong defense, anti-communism, workers and free speech — “Sound familiar?”
- He argues Democrats “turned on every core value” during COVID, accusing them of censoring scientists and doctors under the banner of fighting misinformation; he says that within 37 hours of President Biden’s inauguration, Biden ordered Facebook and Instagram to shut down Kennedy’s accounts to stifle public debate.
- Kennedy says Democrats destroyed freedom of assembly with distancing rules he calls scientifically baseless, closed “every church in our country for a year” while keeping liquor stores and big-box stores open as essential, gutted the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial by giving pharmaceutical companies liability shields, and closed 3 million businesses without due process or just compensation, by his figures.
- He accuses the party of “lawfare” against every challenger: suing Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson and Cornel West, suing Trump 50 times in 38 states, and suing Kennedy himself in 12 states to remove him from ballots he had legally qualified for — then, he says, suing to keep him on the ballot after he endorsed Trump so his votes could not transfer.
- Kennedy says Democrats cancelled their primaries and effectively their convention, and that no primary voter ever cast a vote for Kamala Harris: “a party that doesn’t believe in kings simply crowned a queen,” chosen by anonymous party elites.
- He recounts that Trump called him within three hours of the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting to ask for a meeting, and says everything the mainstream media had told him about Trump “was a lie.” He says the two discussed lower drug prices, farmers and ranchers, ending corporate capture of regulatory agencies, restoring gold-standard science, and above all ending the chronic disease epidemic; he says Trump found it unacceptable that the U.S. pays two to three times what other countries pay while having, in Kennedy’s words, the sickest children in history.
- Kennedy credits Charlie Kirk with an “indispensable” role in bringing him and Trump together over nearly a year, and, marking the first anniversary of Kirk’s assassination, says Kirk believed people of different political traditions can find common ground in love of country and that talking to one another is the only way to save it.
- He says he tried to have the same conversation with Kamala Harris, who he says would not meet him or pick up the phone, and that on August 23, 2024 he suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. He claims results two years into the administration — real food sales up 8% in 2025, obesity rates down 7% after 40 years of increase, and preliminary CDC data he says he received two days earlier indicating a 30-year decline in life expectancy has been reversed — and closes by urging voters to elect a Republican Congress to keep the momentum.