Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s wife Cheryl Hines has taken quite a bit of heat since last week, when her husband withdrew from the presidential race and threw his support behind Donald Trump, as social media users and industry peers chastised her for her “silence.” But it turns out Hines may have had more to do with the pair reconciling their differences than people assumed.
During a sit down on The Tucker Carlson Show, Kennedy revealed how he came to have a face-to-face meeting with Trump prior to ending his own campaign. “I had these meetings with President Trump,” he began, describing the first phone call he received from the campaign “three hours after Trump was shot.”
The campaign team told Kennedy he would also be advising Trump, “which delighted me because I thought ‘Oh my gosh, there’s another candidate besides me that’s listening to the truth,’” he continued. They also informed him that “there was interest in the Trump campaign [and] by the president, of including me and then he talked about vice president, which I wasn’t interested in.”
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When they asked if he would be interested in meeting with Trump, Kennedy initially replied, “I don’t think so.” He explained, “Part of that was, I just thought it was a non-starter with Cheryl.”
During a carpet interview with Variety earlier this year, the married pair told an interviewer they didn’t think their marriage “would survive” if Kennedy joined the Republican ticket as Trump’s running mate. As recently as 2016, Hines had described Trump’s behavior as “ridiculous and disrespectful.” In Kennedy’s post announcing the suspension of his campaign, he thanked Hines for her support “as I made a political decision with which she is very uncomfortable.”
But he’s now revealed that Hines had at least enough comfortability with the former president to encourage her husband to sit down with him—and even to join him at said meeting. After that phone call from Trump’s team, Kennedy continued, “I called Cheryl up and she said to me ‘You should hear him out.’” He then immediately called them back and agreed to the meeting, which Hines herself attended by his side.
“I flew out to Minneapolis the next day and I had a two hour meeting with him,” he shared, “It was a really interesting meeting because he was so open.” He described the former president as “deeply interested” and “well informed” on issues they both cared about, like “chronic disease” and “making sure that we have free speech.”
Hines, for her part, still hasn’t made any public statements about her husband’s decision to endorse Trump, although reports emerged she was not happy with the decision. Social media has not been kind to Hines, as users have mocked her for everything from her typos to marrying someone who admitted to having a dead worm in his brain.
Now, it seems—at least based on Kennedys latest comments—she may have come around to supporting the ex-president she once openly disdained. After all, she told The Hollywood Reporter she’d tried to have more of an open mind about him in the years since 2016: “I was holding on so tightly for so long [to her dislike of Trump],” and “I need to let it all go,” she said.
