Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed up at CPAC and said something that’s going to make a lot of Democrats uncomfortable. The man who spent years on the opposite side of the political aisle from Donald Trump — and technically ran against him, sort of — stood up and essentially torched the left’s favorite talking point: that Trump is stupid.
RFK Jr. described a president with a brilliant mind and exceptional knowledge across a wide range of subjects.
“He has encyclopedic molecular knowledge on these wide range of very, very eclectic interests: music, Broadway shows, pro wrestling… football, every sport. Golf,” Kennedy said. “He knows how everybody made their money and what deals they made, and he tells stories all the time about it. It’s just one after the other.”
But the story that really struck me was one Kennedy told about a campaign flight. Kennedy described sitting across the table from Trump when the conversation turned to Syria. What happened next was, by any measure, remarkable.
“He got a placemat, and he turned it on its back, and then he took a Sharpie, and he drew a perfect map of the Mideast, and then he put the troop strength of every country on every border on that map,” Kennedy recounted.
Off the top of his head, mid-meal, Trump sketched a geopolitically accurate map of one of the most complex regions on earth and annotated it with military data. That’s the guy the media has spent a decade calling an idiot.
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And Kennedy was candid about the significance of that moment. “It just challenged a lot of the assumptions that I had been told about him,” he said. He also noted that Trump carries detailed knowledge of what’s happening inside every federal agency — including Kennedy’s own — and pairs that knowledge with sharp instincts. “He has an instinct for making good choices.”
Then came the line that will really drive the legacy media crazy. Kennedy invoked his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, as a benchmark for understanding how power works in Washington.
“I think my uncle, John Kennedy, understood the uses of power better than any president who has preceded him,” he said. “I think Donald Trump understands the uses of power better than probably any president that we’ve had, at least since Roosevelt, and maybe in American history.”
That would be a remarkable statement from any political figure. From someone from the Kennedy family, it’s huge.
RFK JR: Trump has encyclopedic molecular knowledge across a wide range of very eclectic interests—Broadway shows, golf…
One time, he grabbed a placemat, turned it over, took a Sharpie, and drew a perfect map of the Middle East. Then he marked the troop strength of every country… pic.twitter.com/083wNxpPax
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 28, 2026
From the moment Trump first ran for president, the left has tried to portray him as a bumbling, incurious narcissist who had no business running for president, let alone being president. Sure, they looked the other way when Barack Obama didn’t know how many states there are in this country, or when Joe Biden, well, was Joe Biden, but the myth of “Dumb Donald Trump” has persisted on the left. Earlier this month, for example, Politico insisted that the strong economy isn’t due to Trump’s policies but rather because Trump’s just been lucky.
Kennedy may be in the Trump administration, but he’s no right-wing shill. He’s on a mission to make America healthy again, and I’m sure that his overall political views haven’t changed. He doesn’t need to toot Trump’s horn, yet he went to CPAC and dismantled one of the left’s most insistent narratives piece by piece.
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