‘Oh Look: Trump Interrupts Briefing Over RFK Jr.’s Look — Then Makes a Bizarre Comment About His Chest
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had just about made it into thanking Donald Trump on Friday before he found out the moment no longer belonged to him.
The Oval Office was staged the way these things usually are on Friday, Sept. 18. Governors and Cabinet officials lined up shoulder to shoulder behind the Resolute Desk, cameras live, the White House selling what it billed as a major win on prescription drug costs.
The health secretary had the floor, but he did not keep it for long.
Trump cut in, and what he wanted to discuss had nothing to do with Medicaid, pharmaceutical companies or a single American’s pharmacy bill.
It had to do with the piece of fabric hanging around Kennedy’s neck.
“By the way, I love his tie,” the president said, interrupting his own health secretary mid-sentence.
Kennedy, 72, had turned up in a navy necktie noticeably narrower than the wide, extra-long red ties Trump has worn for decades. Trump wanted sourcing information. “I want to get a nice thin… where do you get a tie like that?” he asked.
So the man running the country’s health agencies stood there, mid-thought, while the president of the United States sized up his neckwear on a live feed.
Then came the two sentences that turned a drug pricing announcement into social media’s clip of the day.
“That’s the thinnest tie I’ve ever seen. It’s almost like a rope,” Trump said, drawing laughter from the officials packed around Kennedy, including Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
He still wasn’t done. “He wants to show off his chest,” Trump added, before finally releasing the floor with a clipped, “Go ahead, Bobby.”
Kennedy took it in stride and went back to what he had been saying, which was thanking Trump for pushing the administration’s drug pricing deals over the line.
On social media, the laughter got as much attention as the joke.
“From the guy who wears his tie down to his knees…” one user wrote, pointing at Trump’s own well-documented sartorial habits. Another kept it to a single decade: “The 1980s wants its fashion back.”
Plenty of people fixated on the officials arranged behind the desk. “Those are the most cringe laughs I’ve ever seen,” one person posted. Another was blunter about the dynamic: “Oh look at me laughing loudest to please the King.”
A fourth summed the whole scene up in a line borrowed from an imaginary handbook: “When the boss tells a joke, you must laugh.”
And one user was simply curious. “‘It’s like a rope.’ I wonder what’s going through his mind?”
What the meeting was supposed to be about got somewhat lost in the neckwear.
Trump had gathered the group to announce that all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico had signed on to a program extending Most Favored Nation pricing to certain drugs inside Medicaid. The administration called it the “GENEROUS” model, which pegs the net price of selected medications to what other wealthy countries pay.
“This one thing alone should win us the midterms,” Trump told reporters, surrounded by Kennedy, Oz, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden.
The announcement landed as cost-of-living concerns dominate voter attention ahead of November, and months after Republicans allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, sending premiums climbing.
Experts also can’t verify the savings the White House is claiming, because the deals themselves haven’t been made public.
“No one knows what is in these deals,” Kathy Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told the AP, as cited by ABC News, noting the administration wants Congress to codify arrangements lawmakers haven’t been allowed to read.
Meanwhile, the same appearance produced another headline. Trump confirmed he is barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, saying there was “no reason” beyond years of coverage he didn’t like.
For Kennedy, it was one more Oval Office cameo in which he was scenery. This comes months after viewers watched Trump sighing and rolling his eyes as Kennedy rambled through a round of praise, and cameras catching Kennedy’s reaction during Trump’s grand convention entrance in Dallas.