Transcript: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

Read the full transcript of US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show podcast episode titled “RFK Jr. Provides an Update on His Mission to End Skyrocketing Autism and Declassifying Kennedy Files”, June 30, 2025.

The Opposition to Reform

TUCKER CARLSON: Mr. Secretary, thank you for doing this. I remember the night that Trump won, talking to people in Washington and their doomsday scenario. The thing that they feared more than North Korea getting the bomb was you becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services. They really were afraid because they felt it was a threat not just to them, but to the whole business of the city. And I think a war, I mean, there’s a reason they felt that way and they probably still do. So what’s that been like? What’s the opposition been like, the organized opposition to your program?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, you know, the irony is I’m not really getting opposition directly from the industry. Most of the industry wants things from this department. And we want to get, you know, we want American industry to profit the pharmaceutical companies, everything else. And so, and I think they know that and they know that we’re working with them. We’re not. They also know they’ve been getting away with stuff up till now and that that era is over.

I get opposition from proxies to the industry. Yes. And I get, I think the major opposition that I feel is from the mainstream media and from Democrats, which is really, that is an interesting phenomenon because these were people I was friends with my whole life and I have not changed and my values have not changed and the policies that I’ve been advocating have not changed. But the party has just a knee jerk reaction against anything that is Trump.

And you know that, you know, President Trump’s in this kind of really paradoxical position where he not only has completely taken over the Republican Party and dictates its platform, but he’s also dictating the platform for the Democratic Party.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve noticed.

How Trump Dictates Both Party Platforms

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Oh, if you know, if I remember, I saw this for the first time on NAFTA. Democrats traditionally were against NAFTA. And as soon as President Trump came out against NAFTA, all the Democrats were now for NAFTA.

The Democrats were the anti war party, but as soon as he expressed his opposition to the Ukraine war, they became the war party. The Democrats traditionally were the biggest critics of the CIA and the intelligence agencies. And as soon as President Trump started complaining about the power of the intelligence agencies in Washington, they became bonded with the intelligence agencies to the extent where they had, for the first time in history, a former CIA director speaking at their convention immediately before Kamala Harris.

They were the party of free speech. And they became. When President Trump started advocating for free speech and his ability to talk, the shutdowns of him on Twitter and these other really crazy efforts to suppress the speech of a former president, he became a major advocate of free speech. And the Democrats are now openly for censorship.

The Democratic Party was the party of women’s sports. My uncle wrote Title Nine, making sure that women had the right to and had the equal access to the resources that they could play sports. And the Democratic Party has become, you know, the party that is now the enemy of women’s sports.

And you can go on and on with those examples, but President Trump is literally dictating the platform of the Democratic Party. Anything that he says, they’re going to be against. And that is also a departure from tradition.

My father was very critical of partisanship. I remember him telling us when we were kids, I don’t vote for the Democratic Republican. I vote for the person whoever’s opposed to best in the job. And you know that partisanship by its nature is dishonest and it is the enemy of democracy.

And that in Washington, George Washington’s farewell speech, he said that, he said he was very scared of the frightened about the rise of the political party because they would become self interested rather than patriotic. They would become interested in promoting their own agendas rather than the agenda of the country. And he thought that was a real threat to American democracy and to this great experiment that we have in democracy.

The Autism Study Initiative

TUCKER CARLSON: I remember your first break with the Democratic Party and with personal friends, even members of your family was a Rolling Stone piece that you wrote about autism, asking why have autism rates arisen? And you were kind of written out of polite society for doing that one of the first things you did as secretary, I think, tell me if I’m mistaken, is commissioned a kind of study of autism. Can you tell us what that is? What are you seeking to do with that?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, I mean, you know, the studies there. There are a handful of studies that CDC has generated on autism. They were all epidemiological studies. And they all say what the CDC wanted them to say is they couldn’t find a link.

The problem is that the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, had said in 2001 that the link between autism vaccine is biologically plausible. And they were highly critical of the way that CDC was making decisions about the vaccine schedule.

That it was, you know, this group, ACIP, which is an external panel which has the responsibility of deciding which new vaccines will be added to the schedule, they had essentially been captured by industry. The people who serve on that panel, almost all of them have financial entanglements with the industry.

And the Institute of Medicine recommended a litany, a retinue of studies, including animal models, observational studies, bench studies, and epidemiological studies.

They said, you need this whole rent node to answer this question. CDC never did those. Instead, it commissioned the creation of these six epidemiological studies. And none of them does what all of them are. They use fraudulent techniques.

You know, they say statistics don’t lie, but statisticians do. And epidemiological studies are very easy to manipulate. None of those studies did what you would want, what you would do if you wanted to find the answer, which is to compare outcomes in a fully vaccinated group to health outcomes in an unvaccinated group.

The Hidden 1999 CDC Study

And CDC did that study in 1999. They brought in a team of scientists under a Belgian researcher named Thomas Verstraeten, and they looked at the data. They looked at children who had received the hepatitis vaccine within first 30 days of life and compare those children to children who had received the vaccine later or not at all.

And they found an 1,135% elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children. And it shocked them. They kept the study secret and they manipulated it through five different iterations to try to bury the link. And we know how they did it. They got rid of all the older children, essentially, and just had younger children who were too young to be diagnosed. And they stratified the data and they did a lot of other tricks, and all of those studies were the subject of that kind of trickery.

And so what we’re going to do now, and meanwhile, the external literature is showing, you know, over 100 studies that show that there, indicate that there is a link.

Making the Data Public

But what we’re going to do now is we’re going to do all the kind of studies that the Institute of Medicine originally recommended and we’re going to do observational studies, retrospective studies and epidemiological studies. We’re going to do real science.

And the way that we’re going to do that is we’re going to make the databases public for the first time. We’ve gone into CDC, we’ve gotten the data from CMS, which is Medicaid and Medicare. We’re getting the data from the vaccine safety data link, which is the biggest repository for HMO health records.

So those records would have all the records of vaccination and then the subsequent health claims and you can do a cluster analysis and look at, see if there’s an association. We’re going to do some in house studies ourselves, but more importantly, we’re going to make this data available for independent scientists so everybody can look at it.

And then we have already put out requests, grant requests, the general scientific communities of that. Any scientists with credentials can apply for a grant and tell us how they want to go about studying these. And so we’re going to get, you know, we’re going to get real studies done for the first time and we should have some answers by September, some initial indicator answers, and then it’ll take over the next six months.

These large studies by independent scientists all over the world. We anticipate there’ll probably be about 15 different major teams who are all trying to answer this question. And within six months we’ll have definitive answers after September.

The Burden of Democratic Citizenship

TUCKER CARLSON: And is it your expectation that those answers will differ from kind of status quo understanding?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I think they will. You know, my opinion, I always tell people, is irrelevant. We, you know, people, we need to stop trusting the experts. Right. We were told at the beginning of COVID don’t look at any data yourself, don’t do any investigation yourself. Just trust the experts.

And trusting the experts is not a feature of science. It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of totalitarianism. In democracies, we have the obligation, and it’s one of the burdens of citizenship to do our own research and make our own determinations about things.

Mothers, when they go shopping, they don’t trust the advertising. A good mother does not trust the advertising. They don’t trust what they hear. They do their own research. And it’s much harder way to live. But you know, that is one of the burdens of living in a democracy is that we, you know, we do our own research, we make up our own minds and that’s the way it should be done.

Gold Standard Science

And we’re going to give people gold standard science. We’re going to publish our protocols in advance, we’re going to tell people what we’re doing and then we’re going to use data and we’re going to publish the peer reviews, which is never published by CDC studies. We’re going to publish anytime that we can, the raw data and then we’re going to, and then we’re going to require replication of every study, which never happens at NIH. Now that’s something new that we’re bringing in is that every study will be replicated.

TUCKER CARLSON: I thought that was like a basic precept of science. We can’t know something unless it can be. Unless the experiment showing it can be replicated. Right?

The Corruption of Scientific Publishing

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. That is a basic precept of science. And unfortunately it has the kind of science that was done by NIH, you know, and NIH was the gold standard agency when I was a kid, but they stopped doing that. And it incentivizes a lot of cheating.

The reason it incentivizes cheating is that if you’re a scientist, your career depends on how much you publish. And so if you have a hypothesis and you say, this is my hypothesis, this is the study that I want to do, and you get a grant from NIH and the hypothesis turns out to be wrong, you know, it doesn’t, it, the science does not support it. A lot of times you cannot get that study published. That’s science. It’s science. When you, when you, you know, a null hypothesis is science and it ought to be published, but the journals won’t do it.

And also the journals won’t publish anything that is, is critical of vaccines. They won’t do it because there’s so much pressure on them. They’re funded by the pharmaceutical companies and they’ll lose advertising, they’ll lose revenue from reprints if they don’t do that. So even Marcia Engel, who is a long time, I think 25 years at the New England Journal of Medicine, she said, you can’t believe anything that’s in the scientific journals anymore. Richard Horton, who’s the longtime editor of the Lancet, is the same thing. He says, we’ve become propaganda vessels for the pharmaceutical companies.

And the pharmaceutical company now you have to pay to get something published in these journals. And so the pharmaceutical companies pay for something. They give a, you know, they hire these, you know, these mercenary scientists, we call them prostitutes, do a study that will validate their product and you know, say that this statin drug works against heart attacks. And they’ll mess with the data because they want it published. They’re being paid by the pharmaceutical companies.

And then once it’s published, the journal will make available preprints. The preprint is a little like a little magazine with the logo of the Lancet on the front. And it has that one article that says this statin drug works or this SSRI works. Then they have tens of thousands of pharmaceutical reps who will take those journal articles and go to every doctor’s office in the country and say, you know, and they’re usually, let me put it this way, hot looking women or, you know, and they’ll, right, they’ll go take the doctor out to lunch. They’ll say, you know, why don’t you start prescribing this drug? And they’ll incentivize the doctor in all kinds of ways to do that.

Financial Incentives in Healthcare

And so the doctors also have their own incentives. You know, perverse incentives. There’s a published article out there now that says that 50% of revenues to most pediatricians come from vaccines. And then there’s a whole structure where Blue Cross and the other insurance companies pay bonuses to the pediatrician to make sure if, for example, 95% of their clients are fully vaccinated, they get a huge bonus. It could be tens of thousands of dollars.

And that’s why your pediatrician, if you say, I want to go slow on the vaccines or I want to have a little different schedule, your pediatrician will throw you out of his practice because you’re now jeopardizing that bonus structure. And these are all perverse incentives that stop doctors from actually practicing medicine and caring for the client. Because they’re looking at the bottom line.

Twenty years ago, 20% of the doctors in this country worked for corporations. Today, 80% do. And that corporation is telling you, we don’t care what happens to your patient. We care about how much revenue you’re generating. And these doctors are coming out of medical schools with ginormous bills that will bankrupt them if they don’t have a job. And so they’re under tremendous pressure just to keep generating those funds.

And the whole system, as you know, it’s just a bundle of perverse incentives that, you know, where everybody is making money by keeping us sick. You know, and I’m not saying that’s deliberate or purposeful or planned in any way. It’s just the incentive system that everybody makes money. Insurance companies make money if you’re sick. Ironically, they make more money if the population is sick.

And, you know, that may seem counterintuitive to people. And a guy said to me once who worked for AIG, one of the big insurance companies, he said. I said, I want to go with some data to AIG and show them that what they’re doing is actually. I can show them on paper, what they’re doing is actually making their people sicker. And they’re the one group that you would think would want healthy people because they’d have to pay out less.

This guy said to me, think of it this way. If you’re Lloyds of London and you insure all the shipping in the world, is it better for you if one ship sinks a year or if 500 sink a year? And I would say, I said to him, it’s better if only one sinks. He said, no, it’s better if 500 sink, because then everybody has to get insurance.

And what the insurance companies are collecting money. Money is friction. They’re taking a cut of the revenues that come through them. The more people that buy insurance, it doesn’t matter what the claims are. If the claims are high, they just raise their premiums and it’s the amount of money that flows in the system that gives them money. So they’re making money that way.

The doctors are making money from keeping us sick. The hospitals are making money from keeping us sick. The pharmaceutical companies are making money from keeping us sick. So every level of the system is incentivized financially. No matter what your intention is. If you’re a doctor, of course you don’t want sick patients. There’s tremendous pressure from every angle of the system to actually, you know, to keep us all sick. And we’re now the sickest nation in the world.

Media Censorship and Pharmaceutical Advertising

TUCKER CARLSON: One of the reasons that there hasn’t been much of a discussion. You said there were signals in 1999 that there was a connection between autism and vaccines. The response from the American media was just to throw you out, take away your New York Times presence, ban you from Rolling Stone, et cetera, attack you as a Nazi. You made the point years later that the reason that happened was because pharmaceutical companies are the single biggest source of revenue for a lot of media companies, and they’re buying the protection with that money.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: That’s another perverse incentive, right? Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think we’re one of only two countries in the world that allow that. Can that be stopped?

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ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: There? Those. That’s a question that we are looking at right now. You know, and there’s a bad Supreme Court case from a couple of years ago that, that gave that essentially anointed pharmaceutical advertising with First Amendment protection there. The First Amendment protects political speech. So if you have, if you’re saying something, you know, political, you should have absolute protection under the First Amendment if commercial speech has a lower level of protection.

And the pharmaceutical advertising was regulated as commercial speech. And it was until 1990, really, around 1992, you didn’t see pharmaceutical adverts. There was no direct to consumer advertising on TV. And after that, and then there were more changes made in 1997. That’s when it became, you know, it exploded.

And today, Roger Ailes, who both you and I knew, you know, I had this very Roger Ailes for your audience, who doesn’t know, which I think most of them do, was the founder of Fox News. And I had this odd relationship with him because politically, we were at loggerheads. But I had spent, when I was 19 years old, I spent three months with him in a tent in Africa. And I. And we developed a friendship then. And as you know, he was very, you know, he was a very engaging guy. He was very witty, really fun to be with, very paranoid, but at the same time, brilliant.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: And he, and so he was very kind to me. He was a very loyal friend to me. And he would make Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto and all the other hosts who, your former colleagues put me on TV to talk about the environment. Even though he didn’t agree with me on it, he made them put me on. So during the 80s and 90s, I was the only environmentalist who was going on Fox News.

But I brought him one time this, this, this around. I think it was like 2014, I brought him a documentary that we had done about mercury and vaccines. And he had, he watched it. He was completely sold on it. He had a family member who had been affected, he felt, and he said, but I can’t put you on because if I did, if any of my hosts allowed you on to talk about this issue, I would have to fire them. And if I didn’t, I would get a call from Rupert within 10 minutes.

And he said for the evening news division, about 75% of the advertising revenues are coming from pharma. And then he told me something that, if I remember it correctly, he said that on a typical evening news show there are 22 ads and 17 of those are pharmaceutical ads. And so this was the principal source of revenue. And for a lot of these television networks, it’s keeping them alive. As you know, they’re all, you know, kind of collapsing financially collapsing due to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Lack of popular demand for their presence.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: So could you end that? Do you have the authority as the Secretary of Health and Human Services to say no more pharma ads on television?

The Problem with Pharmaceutical Advertising

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, you know, a lot of the pharmaceutical ads are misleading. And even the music and the video, the photos that they show, the scenes that they show are. That’s kind of speech and it’s misleading. It’s sending a message. And if you take this drug, you’re going to be riding jet skis and playing volleyball and water skiing and have a great looking spouse. Happy kids.

The side effects meanwhile are rolling at 80 miles an hour. And that’s misleading. And so one of the things that we’re looking at is making them be more honest about what they show so that the public is informed.

Pharmaceutical advertising is insidious for a number of reasons. That’s why they don’t allow it anywhere else in the world. New Zealand has a very, very limited allowance of direct to consumer advertising. Very, very highly controlled. Compared to us, it’s nothing. People who come over here from England or Europe and watch our TV are shocked by what they’re seeing on it.

Why Pharmaceutical Ads Distort the Market

And it’s insidious because the pharmaceutical advertisers are advertising the most expensive version of every drug. They’re not going to advertise the generics because they’re not making any money. So they’re advertising the ones that are the highest profit margins for them.

Normally if you see an advertisement on TV like for Coca Cola, you then have a choice to go get that and you’re paying out of your pocket for it. When somebody buys a pharmaceutical drug, it’s Medicaid and Medicare that are paying for it, whereas us, it’s the taxpayer. So they’re advertising something to the consumer when the consumer has no skin in the game.

And we’re paying for the ads because they’re tax deductible. So we’re paying for them to advertise. And advertisements are getting people to buy drugs that may be ineffective, that may be the least effective drug of the ones that are available.

The Impact on Doctors and Patients

And they go to their physician. The physician is told by his boss, who’s the corporate bean counter, you have 11 minutes with each patient and that’s it. And the physician then can spend that 11 minutes trying to talk the patient out of something that they want. And then the patient’s going to go away unsatisfied. Or the physician could just say, all right, you want this prescription? I’ll write it for you. And then that patient is then going to come back because he’s happy.

The doctors hate it. The American Medical Association has been against it for 30 years. And nobody thinks that this is good for public health. It is hurting us. And it’s distorting the markets. You can’t even call it a free market because everything’s paid for by the federal government.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if in, starting in September, when we start to see the results of the analysis of these massive data sets that you’re putting out there in public, and if it becomes clear that there is a connection between autism and vaccines, vaccines the government promoted, in some cases, promoting, effectively required. That’s a tort. I mean, that means there are a lot of injured people who can now show they were injured by this product. How were they made whole? What happens to them?

The 1986 Vaccine Act and Legal Immunity

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, that’s going to be complicated because in 1986, Congress passed an act, the Vaccine Act, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and they gave the vaccine companies immunity from liability. So no matter how reckless the company is, no matter how toxic the product, no matter how egregious your injury, you cannot sue them. And that’s one of the problems.

And that actually is why we, one of the reasons we had this explosion in the vaccination program. When I was a kid, we only had three vaccines. And by 1986, the year the act was passed, there were 11 doses of, I think, five vaccines. And today there are a child to go to school in states like California and New York and many other states where you have mandates.

An American child now has to receive between 69 and 92 vaccines between conception. So some of those are given to the mom during pregnancy and age 18. And the reason it’s 69 to 82 is some of the vaccines have. The different brands have different dose requirements. So some will require three doses, some will require one dose, some require four doses. But that’s a lot of vaccines for a kid.

The Epidemic of Immune System Disorders

And each one of those is calculated, is designed to permanently alter your immune system. And so we have now this epidemic of immune dysregulation in our country, and there’s no way to rule out vaccines as one of the key culprits.

And if you look at all of these diseases that have become epidemic, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, all of these seizure disorders, the neurological disorders like ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism, all the diseases you and I never saw when we were kids, and suddenly this generation is damaged, is incredibly damaged by all these diseases, the autoimmune diseases like diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, the allergic disease, like peanut allergies, anaphylaxis, eczema. Did you ever know anybody with eczema?

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Right. So. And now it’s ubiquitous in every classroom. And all of those injuries are listed as side effects on the manufacturer’s inserts of those products. We would have to be blind. And I say we have to look at this as a potential culprit.

We have to do the studies that the Institute of Medicine has been telling the CDC to do for 25 years. The Institute of Medicine told CDC in 2013, there are 158 injuries that are suspected to be vaccine injuries. Only 38 of those have been studied and most of those it was positive. It was, yeah. This is vaccine injury. The other 120 have never been studied.

CDC’s job is to study them, and yet it never studied them. And that was purposeful. And I’m not saying that out of speculation. I’m saying that because I’ve seen the emails. And CDC deliberately derailed any study on that. And if somebody does, independent scientists does do a study, they can’t get it published. The scientific publishers will not publish a study that is critical of vaccines.

So we need to change that taboo. And that’s one of the things Jay Bhattacharya is doing at NIH, is we’re going to remove the taboo about talking about this issue and we’re going to be honest with the American public.

COVID Vaccine Injuries in VAERS

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s pretty clear from the VAERS self reporting vaccine injury system, federal system, that vaccine injuries with the COVID vaccine jumped to multiples of what had been reported before.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: There were more injuries reported from VAERS by the COVID vaccine than all other vaccines put together for the past 36 years.

And I’ll tell you something else. There’s a lot of people out there who say this is part of the consensus. You’ll see this on every mainstream. Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, all of these guys again and again that the link between autism vaccines has been debunked. It’s been studied.

Those studies that I was talking about earlier, the epidemiological studies, they only looked at one vaccine, the MMR, and one ingredient, thimerosal. None of the vaccines that are administered to children during the first six months of life have ever been studied for autism.

The Institute of Medicine’s Findings

In fact, the Institute of Medicine said that they looked at this issue. It hasn’t been debunked. And they said no these studies have never been done on the vaccines that are the most likely culprit, which is DTAP, the pneumococcal, the vaccines in their first six months, none of them.

They said the only one that has ever been studied is DTAP, which is diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. And they said that the one study that was done showed that, yeah, there was a link with autism. But we’re not going to count that study because it was based on the VAERS system, which is CDC’s only surveillance system. And they said that system is too unreliable.

So what they were saying, the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, the only system that CDC has to study vaccine injury, is so bad that any study done on it, we’re not going to count.

The Problems with VAERS

I’ll tell you something else. David Kessler, who was a very famous surgeon general, who you remember, and many, many, many other people have said that their system does not work and you need a new system.

So in 2010, CDC designed a new system and it was a machine counting system. The problem with VAERS, with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, is that it’s voluntary. And so the doctor has to. If he sees a vaccine injury, he’s required to report it to VAERS, but there’s no penalty. If he doesn’t, it takes him a half an hour to fill out the paperwork. So there’s a big incentive for him not to do it.

There’s another incentive, though. He doesn’t know if something is vaccine injury. If you get a vaccine and then four months, four years later, you come in with a food allergy, how do you know? Will any doctor in the world say that’s a vaccine injury or seizure disorders?

And the other thing. So they don’t know what to look for. They’ve never been taught that at medical school. There’s no course on vaccine injury in medical school in any medical school in this country.

And the other thing is, he has a big emotional incentive because he told that mom to give that child that vaccine. And if the child has a seizure three weeks later and she comes back and she says, I think it might be the vaccine, a lot of doctors will say, no, that’s normal for that age. And they’re not going to call it in the VAERS.

The Harvard Pilgrim Study

So CDC designed a machine counting system that would do essentially a cluster analysis. They would look at the vaccine and then they would look at clusters of injuries that were unique or anomalous to that vaccine. And it was a very accurate system according to the group that designed it. It was a team led by a guy called Lazarus.

And CDC paid for the whole thing, millions of dollars. And it was a long term study. And they looked at one HMO, Harvard Pilgrim up in Massachusetts, and they did this machine counting system for Harvard Pilgrim.

And then they compared what the machine counting system had yielded and collected in terms of vaccine injuries. And they compared that to what VAERS had collected during the same period at Harvard Pilgrim. And they said that VAERS was capturing fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries and they had a system now that would capture over 95%.

And they were very proud and they brought it to CDC and said our system works. Here’s the data. The data showed injuries in about 2.7% of vaccines.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of all vaccines.

Vaccine Injury Reporting and AI Revolution

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, all vaccines. About 2.7%. Wow. Which I think is something like one out of every 37 vaccines you get, there’s an injury. And CDC saw that and said, we’re not going to use the system and they shelved it in 2010. And they’ve continued to use VAERS now for 22 years. When they know that it doesn’t work, can you bring it back? It was designed to fail.

We’re going to absolutely change VAERS and we’re going to make it, we’re going to create either within VAERS or supplementary to VAERS, a system that actually works. And you know that right now even that system is antiquated because we have access to AI.

And one of the, you know, we are creating here at HHS an AI revolution. We’ve been able to attract the top people from Silicon Valley. People have walked away from billion dollar businesses and they don’t want prestige, they don’t want position, they don’t want power, they want to change, they want to make the system work.

And we’re, we’re going to, we are at the cutting edge of AI. We’re implementing it in all of our departments at FDA where we’re accelerating drug approvals so that you don’t need to use primates or even animal models. You can, you know, you can do the drug approvals very, very quickly with AI.

And we’re also implementing a CMS to detect waste, abuse and fraud, which is, it’s extraordinary at that. But we’re also going to use it at CDC and throughout our system to look at the megadata that we have and be able to make really good decisions about interventions.

For example, if you look at the population as a whole and say, okay, we’re using three different diabetes drugs with five different statin drugs or all these SSRIs and others. You can then look drug by drug and you can tell on the population whether it’s working or not and which one is giving you the best bang for the buck. Which one has the most side effects. We have a potential now to use AI in ways that are going to revolutionize medicine.

COVID Vaccine Injury Compensation

TUCKER CARLSON: What about all the people who are injured by the COVID vax? There are a lot of them. I know a lot of them. Some died, some were permanently disabled. Nobody seems to care. You never hear about them and they don’t seem to be getting any help. Will that change?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, that’s going to change. I mean, as I said, the big impediment is 1986 Vaccine Act. Yes. And so it’s complicated about how we fix this so that we can get compensation to those people.

We just brought a guy in this week who’s going to be revolutionizing the vaccine injury compensation program, which is a program when Congress passed the Vaccine act and gave immunity from liability of vaccine companies. It recognized that vaccines were, in the word of the description, the characterization of the American Academy of Pediatrics were unavoidably unsafe.

And some people like for every medicine, some people are going to be injured and killed. And so it set up a program that’s in the federal government, all the vaccine courts, and they have a trust fund. The trust fund is endowed by a 75% surcharge on every vaccine.

And that program is supposed to. There’s supposed to be a vaccine court that’s supposed to be generous and fast and give the tie to the runner. In other words, if there’s doubts about whether somebody’s injury came from vaccine or not, you’re going to assume they got it and compensate them.

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And it’s paid out over $5 billion now to about 12,000 people. And we’re looking at ways to enlarge that program so that COVID vaccine injured people can be compensated. And we’re changing the program so that we’re looking at ways to enlarge the statute of limitations, only three years. And a lot of people don’t discover their injuries. So after that, and there’s no discovery in that program. There’s no rules of evidence.

The program has devolved into lawyers from the Justice. You’re not suing the vaccine company. You’re petitioning my agency. And it’s represented traditionally by the Department of Justice and the lawyers in the Department of Justice. The leaders of it were corrupt, and they were. They saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice.

And we’re going to change all that. And I’ve brought in a team this week that is starting to work on that this week. So, you know, that’s one of the things we’re doing, but we’re looking at everything.

Current COVID Vaccine Status and Recommendations

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the status of the COVID vaccine now? Who gets it? What are the recommendations and why?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: The recommendations now are children under 18 are not recommended to get the vaccine, but they can get it if they want. You know, it’s through a joint consultation with their physician who is available to them.

There is a. And, you know, there’s a new version of the COVID vaccine that just came out that was approved by FDA. And that vaccine is going to actually do real clinical trials, and it’s being given to people who are 65 years older or have profound comorbidities. But the agreement with the company is that everybody who takes it will be part of a clinical trial. So we’ll actually get some real data.

And as you know, there was just data chaos with the other vaccine. In fact, you know, the Pfizer vaccine, when it came out, should it. It had a higher all cause mortality. So more people died in the placebo group. I mean, more people died in the vaccine group than in the placebo group.

I had 20,000 people who got the vaccine, 20,000 who didn’t. And after six months they looked at it and there was 23% more deaths in the vaccinated group from all causes than in the placebo group. And the efficacy was kind of dubious because. Well, yeah, there was only two people who died from COVID in the placebo group and there was one person who died from COVID in the vaccine group. And that’s the whole data set they were looking at.

And so they said, you remember they were saying the vaccine is 100% effective. Well, that’s why they were saying it, because there was, there was two. Two is 100% of one. Right? 100% larger than one. So that. But that’s what they had. But they were telling the American people it’s 100% effective.

And that when people heard that, they thought, if you get the vaccine, you can’t get Covid, which of course now we realize, now everybody realizes was wrong because everybody got Covid whether they got the vaccine or not. And you know, what they really should have been telling people is that in order to prevent one death from COVID you had to give 19,999 vaccines. If any of those vaccines were killing people, you would cancel out the effect of, you know, the beneficial effect.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think the COVID I mean, net net, as we say in business. Just kidding. Do you think overall the COVID vaccine killed more than it saved?

Government Censorship and Information Suppression

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: My opinion about that is irrelevant. What we’re going to try to do is make that science available so the public can look at the science. And I would not say one way or the other. And the truth is I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is because the studies that were done by my agency were substandard and they were not designed to answer that question.

And there’s been a lot of obfuscation about covering up, as you know, about suppressing any kind of discussion of vaccine injuries. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg publicly said that he was ordered by the White House to suppress anybody on his platform, on Facebook or Instagram who mentioned vaccine injuries. Oh, he was ordered by the Biden administration to.

And he said, you know, I, he said I was Stunned. I was being ordered by the federal government to deny facts. Anybody can look him up on YouTube saying that.

So. And we know that too, because I sued the Biden administration and we got all this discovery documents that show that he was. 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the Constitution, he opened up a group in the White House whose job it was to suppress any dissent about this government policy.

And I was the first person that they went after. 37 hours after he took that oath, they were telling Facebook to take me off of Instagram, which Facebook did. I had almost a million followers and there was no vaccine misinformation on there. I asked Facebook again and again, show me one fact I got wrong. Everything I put on there that, you know, was vaccine related was cited and sourced to government databases or to peer reviewed publications.

And. But they were, you know, it was not, it wasn’t misinformation, the word. In fact, they had to invent a new word, which is because Facebook was saying to the White House, this isn’t misinformation, it’s actually true. And the White House said, well, it’s mal information. Mal information. This is an Orwellian kind of construct.

And, you know, mal information is information that is factually true, but it is nevertheless inconvenient for or the government. And they were, you know, they just. All the people who are now running this agency were censored. Oh, Jay Bhattachara was censored. Marty McCary was censored. Dr. Oz was censored. Vinay Prasad was censored. We were all sent. I was censored.

TUCKER CARLSON: I remember. Well, what’s the status of the COVID vaccine? Pregnant women.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: The recommendation has been removed now for pregnant women.

mRNA Technology Safety Concerns

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you satisfied that mRNA technology is safe for people?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I am not satisfied. Again, my opinion about that is irrelevant. But we will be doing those studies. And I would say there’s a lot of skepticism in this agency about mRNA vaccines, about mRNA technology, about the status of it now, about whether it’s safe.

And we do not, you know, the safety studies simply have not been done. But there’s enough anecdotal reports of people getting profound injuries that may or may not be associated with it. And we’re going to answer those questions.

Vaccine Advisory Board Conflicts of Interest

TUCKER CARLSON: What happened with the vaccine board? I keep reading you fired all these eminent scientists on the vaccine.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, I fired all these what?

TUCKER CARLSON: All these important, highly credentialed scientists.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, we fired that board because they were. It was utterly. It was just an instrument. It was a sock puppet. For the industry that it was supposed to regulate.

So, you know, they, you know, and this was a long time coming. Tucker. In 2000, the government oversight Committee and the United States Congress held hearings about that board, which is called ACIP Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. And they said that 97% of the people on that board had undisclosed conflicts. Many of them had disclosed conflicts as well.

But they said that Congress said that. It gave an example. It said rotavirus vaccine was approved by that board. And there were five members of that board at that time, and four of them had direct financial interest in the rotavirus vaccine. They were working for the companies that made the vaccine or they were receiving grants to do clinical trials on that vaccine. They all had overwhelming financial interests.

One of the people on that board was a guy called Paul Offit and who is one of the big voices for vaccines that CNN goes to him all the time when it wants to know about vaccines. He voted to add the rotavirus vaccine to the schedule when he had a rotavirus vaccine in development, because it’s now on the schedule. His developing vaccine is virtually guaranteed to get on the schedule. It’s a competitive product.

But once you say rotavirus vaccine has to be vaccinated for his vaccine is now guaranteed to get on the schedule, the one they voted on, that he voted on. Within a year, it had to be withdrawn because it was causing this really disastrous disease in kids that is often lethal called intussusception. Agonizingly painful when you’re intestines kind of tie up against each other and it kills children. You know, on occasion.

That vaccine was pulled the following year and his vaccine then replaced him. He was still on the committee. He didn’t vote on that, but he was still on the committee.

TUCKER CARLSON: But he voted to make rotavirus vaccine mandatory for the schedule.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: And then he and his business partners, Stanley Plotkin and a couple of other people sold that vaccine to Merck for $186 million. He told Newsweek that he won the lottery. You know, it’s been said of him that he voted himself rich. So that kind of conflict was typical on that committee.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did people know this was going on? That’s such an obvious…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: You know, the Office of Inspector General in this department investigated and they said, this is a disaster. You got to change it. Congress investigated and said, you got to change it. And they did nothing.

The most glaring example of medical malpractice by this group is that they approved all these vaccines. We went from 11, remember, to 69 to 92 – 11 vaccines in ’86. And not one of them had, except for Covid. Covid is the only one, and had a pre-licensing safety trial that involved a placebo, a true placebo. And so all of those other vaccines were ushered in without safety studies. And that means nobody understands the risk profile of those products.

TUCKER CARLSON: How can you do that?

Financial Incentives Behind Vaccine Approvals

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: They did it. It’s corruption and it’s because of agency capture. It’s because the companies that were making these products. If you can get your vaccine on the schedule, it’s generally typically about a billion dollars a year for your company because you now have a trapped market with no downside.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, you’ve got an immediate…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: First of all, the federal government oftentimes actually designs the vaccines. NIH would design, would hand it over to the pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company then runs it through ACIP, runs it first through FDA, then through ACIP and gets it recommended. If you can get that recommendation, you now got a billion dollars in lease revenues by the end of the year, every year, forever.

So there was a gold rush to add new vaccines to this schedule and ACIP never turned away a single vaccine. Everyone that came to them, they recommended. And a lot of these vaccines are for diseases that are not even casually contagious.

You know, they recommended the hepatitis B vaccines for babies when they’re an hour old, the first day of life, they get that. And you know, hepatitis B, if your mother’s got it, you should get it. And you can pass through maternal transmission, but every mother that goes to the hospital in this country is tested for it. So we know which ones are vulnerable, which aren’t.

But the mass vaccination of the entire population, including children – this is a disease you get through sexual transmission or you get it from sharing needles. And particularly it was prevalent among promiscuous gay men. But the risk to a one day old baby was 1 in 7 million.

TUCKER CARLSON: Very few of whom are promiscuous…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Very few of whom are involved in prostitution or drug addiction. So, you know, but it was all financial drivers. And a lot of the diseases that they target are not diseases. The vaccine itself does not prevent transmission. And so, you know, the justification for having it mandated is very ephemeral.

And you know, these are all things that we need to look at. We want to protect public health, but that means protecting against chronic disease too. And these vaccines have – there’s nobody who will contest that they can cause chronic disease, chronic injuries that last a lifetime.

Anthony Fauci’s Role and Immunity

TUCKER CARLSON: So one of the reasons that the system has become so corrupt, I think it’s fair to say, is Anthony Fauci, one of the longest serving federal employees, who was the subject of one of the bestselling books of a couple of years ago, which you wrote, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” amazing book. And all this information about him was exposed to the world and he gets some sinecure at Georgetown and still Secret Service protection. He seems to be thriving.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: He doesn’t have Secret Service protection any longer. President Trump took that away from him. But he got immunity. Why did he need immunity? You know, why did he need a pardon in advance?

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think the answer is?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I would be speculating, but I think he was vulnerable. I think he had a lot of liability on creating coronavirus. He was funding precisely that research at the Wuhan lab. And he was giving them the technology. He was giving them not only the technology, the precise technology for developing that pathogen and published about it, by the way. The publications credit NIH for financing the studies.

But he also gave them – one of his fundees, Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina developed a technique called seamless ligation technique, which is a technique for hiding the laboratory origins of a manipulated virus. So that normally if there’s a virus manipulated, you can look at it, researchers can look at it, they can look at the DNA sequences and they can say this thing was created in a lab.

Ralph Baric had developed a technique that he called the “no see ’em” technique, and its technical name was seamless ligation. And it was a way of hiding evidence of human tampering. What is the public health rationale? If you were interested in public health, you would want to be doing the inverse of that. You would want to be pinning red flags all to it and say this was created by people.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s what you would do if you’re creating viruses for biological warfare.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: That’s right. And that’s another question is why would he give it to the Chinese? I mean, that was a military lab, it was run by the military.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s hard to even understand that. What would be the rationale for doing that?

Gain of Function Research Concerns

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I try not to look in other people’s heads. I try, like in the Fauci book, I never look in and speculate about what his motives are. I just say this is what he did. But I do think that there’s this among a lot of the people who were doing that kind of research, the gain of function research, their big career, economic and professional incentives to break ground, to break new ground.

One of his fundees created an avian flu virus which can be very deadly to humans if you can make it do human to human transmission, and he developed one that could jump to mammals. Why would you do that? You know, you’re just inviting a catastrophe. And they published it and bragged about it.

And I think there’s this kind of – I don’t know whether I would call it a God complex or something where some of the people in that field seem to have this kind of sense of omnipotence or something from developing something that can kill all of humanity. But I don’t know. That is sheer speculation.

TUCKER CARLSON: That sounds right to me. So it sounds like Fauci is beyond the reach of the law at this point.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, I think generally, unless there was a truth commission, you know, which they did in South Africa, they did it in Central America after the 1980s wars there. And they were very, very helpful to those societies. And I think we should probably do something like that now.

And in those cases, what happens is you have a commission that hears testimony on what exactly happened. Anybody who comes and volunteers to testify truthfully is then given immunity from prosecution. But so that at least the public knows who did what.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: And people who are called and don’t take that deal and perjure themselves, they then can be prosecuted criminally.

Declassification of Kennedy Files

TUCKER CARLSON: We don’t have a good track record of revealing the truth in a timely manner, as you know better than anybody. The President on January 23 issued an executive order ordering the full declassification of files related to the murder of your uncle, father, and Martin Luther King. And, you know, we haven’t seen all of them yet. Where is that process? Have your conclusions about any or all of those three murders changed on the basis of new documents?

The Kennedy Assassinations: Evidence and Ongoing Questions

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: No, nothing’s changed. I mean, you know, as you know, there’s already millions of pages of documents out there. And I think, you know, in terms of my uncle’s death, I think that, you know, that that ship has sailed. I don’t think anybody who actually is willing to read the evidence now will question the fact that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy.

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And that, in fact, Congress, in 1973, when the church committee looked at. I think it was 73, the 75. Yep. Church committee, they said it was conspiracy. That was the conclusion of the Congressional committee. So the Warren Committee that was run by Alan Dulles, who was, you know, had a lot of reasons to lie and did lie throughout. And in fact, he said at one of the sessions, yeah, if we were involved in this, we would lie.

Oh, he said that. And he got himself put on that committee. And he was really should have been called the Dulles Commission. He said, it’s a single shooter. But then in 75, that was 64. So 11 years later, Congress investigated, and they had a much larger purview. They had much more data at that time, and they said it was a conspiracy.

But since then, there’s been million documents released and probably 30 people who were involved and made confessions, including many of the prime actors. And so I don’t think there’s any doubt that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy.

The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: Unanswered Questions

My father is more difficult because we just don’t have the data. It’s never been investigated. And, you know, I’ve been trying to get an investigator. You know, one of the women who played potentially a key role in it was a woman called. One woman in the polka dot dress who was. Who was. Who appeared to be Sirhan’s handler. And that woman is living openly in Tarzana, California. Nobody’s ever talked to her. And she, you know, people should. This should be investigated, and people should talk to her and, you know, really investigate the crime.

So. And as you know, and I think I’ve talked to you about this before, and my father, Sirhan was there. There were 77 eyewitnesses in the kitchen at the time. And he took two shots of my father. One of those shots hit Paul Schraed in the head, and Paul Schrade survived. And the other one hit the door jamb behind my father, and it was later removed by the LAPD.

And then Sirhan was grabbed by six people, including Rafer Johnson, Rosie Greer, Carl Ulrich, who is the. The manager of the Ambassador Hotel. And they. They turned his gun. They bent him over the steam table, and they turned his gun away from my father. Six more shots in it, and he emptied the chamber.

So they. Sirhan, or Rafer told me that Sirhan had superhuman strength. Sirhan is a little tiny guy, you know, and I’ve met him and. And talked to him, and. But he’s very. He’s kind of a frail. I mean he’s frail now because he’s old. But even then he was just a little tiny guy, you know, and was not particularly strong. And Rafer said he had superhuman strength and he could not pry the gun from his hand. And he fired six more shots. All those shots hit people. We know what happened every, every shot in his gun.

The Ballistics Evidence

And my father was shot by four shots from behind. One of them passed harmlessly through the shoulder pad of his. This was Noguchi’s autopsies at through the shoulder pad of his suit. And all the others were contact shots meaning the barrel of the gun was either touching his body or less than three inches from his body. The last shot that killed him was behind his left ear. And that shot he Noguchi Sundays was from 1 to 3 inches from him. And Sirhan was never behind him. Sirhan was always in front of him.

And they, a guy who almost certainly took those shots was a security guard who had just gotten his job within a week before. And he was, he was a. My father fell down on him. My father must have known that he was being shot because the last thing he did was he turned and he tore off the clip on tie from Cesar. Cesar had him by the left hand and had steered him into the ambush. And he had his right hand, he had his right hand, his gun in his right hand. And he, he admitted it. He was seen, you know, my father fell on him and he pushed my father off. And he is gun drawn and he was, the gun was not taken away from him by the LAPD.

He was in a terrible job, not only tower but a malevolent job because they destroyed 2,500 photographs that were taken that night before the trial. There were photographs, you know, 2,500 photographs in that kitchen and the ballroom. And the LAPD collected them and destroyed them all. And you have to ask why would they do that? And a lot of the other evidence was also destroyed including the door jams. And you know, we have pictures of them but we, we don’t have the real thing. And then they never confiscated the gun from, from Cesar’s and Cesar said that oh, I had the gun out because I was going to shoot at Sirhan. And so, you know, that should be questioned.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are there any documents.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I’ll just say this, that yes, Cesar was working at that time. His, his job was working for Lockheed plant in Los Angeles and he had a top security classification at that. And Lisa Pease, who’s one of the researchers and authors who’s written extensively about this went through his background and the only employer that he ever listed officially in his background was the CIA.

So there are a lot of questions and we don’t know the answers to them. You know, I was in contact with Cesar in 2019, 2020, negotiating with him. He had moved to the Philippines. And I was trying to see if he would talk to me and I was going to go over there and talk to him and he said, I’ll do it for $5,000. And then when I got close, he said 10,000 and he said 20,000. Then he said 30,000 and, you know, and then he just said, I’m not going to meet with you. Oh, you know, he. And then he since passed away. So, you know, again, we don’t know, but there are enough kind of flags on it that you would, you know, that if you were actually wanted to know answers, you would be asking questions.

Document Release and Future Revelations

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you confident that. I know there’s been some frustration about getting all the documents relevant to those three murders, those three assassinations. Are you confident that all of it will come out by the end of this term?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I’m confident that President Trump will release anything that he has access to. But, you know, I don’t expect anything groundbreaking to come from those documents because first of all, with my uncle, we’ve already got everything. There may be little things like the calendar for Bill Harvey, who is one of the people was in the CIA, who is almost certainly involved, and, and other things like that that would be. And then more evidence.

I mean, you know, the evidence that came out the last tranche. The New York Times had to finally admit that, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset, which they’d been denying for 50 years. They finally admitted, yeah, he was working for the CIA. And so, you know, there may be some more validation of what, you know, he was doing and how he was recruited, etc. But I don’t think it’s going to be anything groundbreaking. I don’t think you need anything groundbreaking. I think, listen, I was a prosecutor. If I had to try the case right now, you know, against a number of the people are dead, I believe I can win in front of a jury with it. Just with the evidence that we got.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: With my dad, you know, it was never investigated and that was deliberate.

Returning to Washington

TUCKER CARLSON: So last question, you left, what, you were born here, obviously. Your father’s Attorney General of the United States when you were young. He’s murdered. 1968. You leave Washington, you haven’t lived here since. You just came back as secretary. What’s it, like, what do you notice? What do you think of it?

Life in Washington and Working with the Trump Administration

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, you know, I didn’t expect to love living in Washington. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get out of here Washington. But, you know, my wife is happy here. We found kind of a community in a neighborhood. And I love the people that I’m working with at this agency. It’s the most gifted, committed group of people that I’ve ever worked with. And they’re, you know, immensely talented and committed.

And then I really like the cabinet. I think, you know, President Trump’s cabinet has put together an extraordinary Cabinet. I’m friends with a number of the people I never thought I’d be friends with, but they’re, you know, what do you like? I mean, I really, I really get along with Pam Bondi and, and, you know, Cheryl loves Pam and, and her husband John. And then I really, and Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio is the funniest guy in the Cabinet. He says things that make people belly laugh every Cabinet meeting.

And he’s, you know, I always, I never was very, let’s say, approving of Marco because he was kind of a neocon war hawk. But now he’s had this incredible transformation. And, you know, I think he’s very aligned with me on most issues on Ukraine, you know, and just the fact that we should not be the policeman of the world anymore, that we’ve got to withdraw from that role.

But I get, I really, I, you know, Scott Turner is my friend, Sean, you know, and all of them, I get along. Linda McMahon, I got along. You know, one of the things was President Trump is that he really knows how to pick talent. And I’m not talking about me, but the other people on there. When you sit in those Cabinet meetings and every one of those people is incredibly erudite and just fluid in the way that they speak and very, very comfortable.

Trump’s Cabinet Selection Strategy

And they’re one of the things that President Trump did when he picked a cabinet. And I was on the transition team, so I watched what he was doing. For every one of the positions that he picked, he wanted to see three clips of them performing on TV. And so, you know, he’s very conscious of the way that these people are going to be out selling his program to the public and that he needs people who are, you know, good salespeople, not only good administrators, but that they can communicate a message to the public.

And I think this time around, you know, everybody tells me it’s completely different than the last administration because he’s, you know, he had so much time to grow and to learn and to, you know, figure out how to do this right.

The Need for Revolutionary Change

And, you know, we need a revolution in this country. We’ve got, you know, we’ve got 34 trillion dollars debt. We’ve got, we’re spending 2 trillion or more a year than we got. We’re borrowing it from China and from Saudi Arabia and Japan. We have a 1.2 trillion dollar trade deficit. And, you know, a lot of people are, businesses are hurting because of the tariffs.

But over the, I, you know, I admire President Trump because he is looking over the horizon and he’s looking at, you know, we’re unsustainable and we need to do something radically different. And, you know, you need to, particularly at the beginning when you have momentum and when you have your most power, you need to do a lot of things that are going to be very, very disruptive to many, many people.

He still has tremendous support for the American public. And I feel it every day. I walk down a block and, you know, people are ecstatic. They, you know, come to me and hey, thank you for what you’re doing. And they feel good about this country again.

Lessons from Ted Kennedy and Reagan

You know, I’ll just tell you another anecdote if we have time. My uncle, Ted Kennedy really didn’t personally did not like Jimmy Carter. He every level, famously, he didn’t like his politics, he didn’t like him personally. And you know, Carter did a lot of things that my uncle was just, I mean, one of them was he banned liquor from the White House, which, you know, my uncle didn’t like. And then he put, you know, what was it, fresco or something on tap at the White House. And so there were just little things like that that annoyed him.

But he also, when Carter came in, he talked about the malaise in this country and how bad everything was. And it’s like what Starmer did in England, you know, and people take those messages from their command from their leader. And my uncle. And then Reagan came in and Reagan was dismantling everything Teddy had done over, you know, 40 year career. But Teddy really liked him.

And I asked him one time, wow, you know, this guy is destroying everything you believe in. And Ted said, because he makes people feel good about being American and he’s able to inspire hope for the country again. And, you know, President Trump does that. Whatever you think about him, there’s a new feeling in America now that, you know, we’re back on the upswing again. You know, as he says, the country is hot again. You know, and all around the world people see that too.

Discovering Trump’s Multi-Dimensional Character

And, you know, a lot of things have surprised me about the President because I, you know, bought into this fact that he was this one dimensional character, that he was kind of a bombastic narcissist and all this. And, you know, and part of it is hearing it all the time on TV. But also, you know, the way that he conducts himself sometimes validates those, if you have that narrative, you can find things, what he does that validate that narrative.

But what I’ve been surprised in getting to know him is what a kind of deep, multi dimensional and thoughtful character he is and how. Well, I also thought, oh, he doesn’t read and, you know, he’s not interested in anything. He’s immensely curious, inquisitive and immensely knowledgeable. He’s encyclopedic in certain areas that you wouldn’t expect, like music. And, you know, he gets very emotional about music. And he is, and he knows the whole story behind every song.

TUCKER CARLSON: Pavarotti and James Brown.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, yeah, he cries when he hears Pavarotti. He said to me one night when we were at Mar-a-Lago with the Amaryllis, he said, Amaryllis, you understand this because she loves music too. And he said, but most of the people here, they don’t understand it. They don’t get it.

And then in terms of sports, he is, he just, he’s an encyclopedia. He knows everything. And you know, on Wall Street, he knows how everybody made their money and the stories. And he’s, you know, an incredible raconteur about telling all these stories.

Trump’s Empathy and Populist Nature

And then, and also the most surprising thing is because I had pegged him as a narcissist when narcissists are incapable of empathy. And he’s one of the most empathetic people that I’ve met. You notice whenever he talks about the Ukraine war. Yes, he always talks about the casualties on both sides. Every time he talks about it, I have noticed that. And he does that in every theater. He talks about how human beings are affected by it.

You know, whether it’s vaccines or Medicaid or Medicare, he’s always thinking about how this impacts the little guy. And, you know, the Democrats have pegged him as a guy who’s sort of sitting, you know, in the cabinet meeting talking about how can we make billionaires richer. He’s the opposite of that. He’s a genuine populist.

And, you know, like, all of us were 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 just, you know, morale, but also just, well, you know, the deficits are. You know, who could ever. Would you believe we’d ever have a president in our lifetime who would actually be addressing, you know, the cost of government in a dramatic way?

And the trade deficits, how could you ever cure that? It’s too entrenched. And so many people, you know, making money and. But meanwhile, all us all going to hell in a handbasket. And, you know, so I think he’s doing stuff at great political cost to him that is going to benefit this country 10 years from now and 20 years from now. And, you know, I’m really proud to be part of it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Thank you very much.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Thank you, Tucker.