Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a long-winded and bizarre response when asked how he felt about being condemned by his cousin shortly before her death.
While being interviewed on stage by political commentator Armstrong Williams, the MAGA health secretary was pressed on how he deals with criticism from his own family, who are descendants of the Democratic dynasty.
This includes Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, who labelled RFK Jr. an “embarrassment” to the family while writing about her cancer diagnosis for The New Yorker in November 2025. Schlossberg died the following month from acute myeloid leukemia at the age of 35.
“I’m very sorry for her and her family, but the criticism that my family has made of me does not bother me,” Kennedy said.
“It’s a gift, because every time you face adversity in your life, it’s an opportunity for spiritual advancement. Pain is the touchdown of spiritual growth,” he added. “And if you look at those things as a gift and practice acceptance, and just say everything that’s supposed to happen was meant to happen, like God wants it to happen, then what am I supposed to do with it?”
The health secretary—the son of President John F. Kennedy’s brother, former attorney general and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968—also listed other tragedies that have affected the family during the so-called “curse.” These include the deaths of two of his brothers: David Kennedy, who died of a drug overdose in 1984, and Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, who died in a skiing accident in 1997.
Kennedy also claimed he lost two nieces “during COVID.” In fact, his niece Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of a drug overdose in August 2019, before the pandemic began, and another niece, Maeve Kennedy McKean, drowned in April 2020.
“These are terrible tragedies, but I was able during those times to consult people. I knew what to say to people, to make them feel better, to share the grief and to bring people together in love and unity, rather than doing something selfish, which would have driven people apart,” Kennedy Jr. said. “So pain is a gift that God gives us to allow us to use our divine capacity to turn evil things into good.”
In edited quotes of the interview published by The Baltimore Sun, which Williams partly owns, Kennedy added: “When family members criticize me publicly, I don’t see betrayal. I see adversity. And adversity is instruction.
“If you harbor resentment, you destroy yourself. I try to respond to hatred with love. That frees me.”
The Kennedy family has frequently spoken out against him during his move into politics, including his surviving siblings.
Last November, Schlossberg wrote a damning criticism of her cousin in The New Yorker just weeks before her death, as he carried out his anti-vaccine agenda in the Trump administration.
“I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government,” Schlossberg wrote. “Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky.”
“Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly,” she added.
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