Forget Trump’s Bruised Hand – What Bobby Kennedy’s Hands Did in the ’68 Campaign Is 100x Worse – Yet the Media Adored Him

If you spend any time on social media — specifically, tracking the people who expend copious amounts of energy pretending that everything around Donald Trump is both newsworthy and terrible — you know the story of the president’s bruised hands.

I didn’t know that bruising on your hands was a sign of terminal illness and decline. But it is, if you listen to the Aaron Rupars of the social media sphere.

For instance, this stuff got ignored for four years by the mainstream media:

JUST IN: President Biden sounds like he is speaking a different language while giving a speech at the Earth Rider Brewery in Superior, Wisconsin.

Don’t worry… The media has assured us that he is sharper than ever!

“The beer brewed here. It is used to make the brewed beer.… pic.twitter.com/UeJ3zf2ZXX

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 25, 2024

Until this:

Needless to say, the drugs didn’t work. pic.twitter.com/3lYHnU476w

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 28, 2024

But now, the same people who ignored Biden’s decline suddenly seem to all agree that Donald Trump has bruisable hands and we need to appoint a special counsel to look into this, or something:

Yikes! Both of Trump’s hands are discolored today and one of them appears bruised as well

(Anna Moneymaker/Getty) pic.twitter.com/IZEw3j1JzD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 6, 2026

Yikes! Both of Donald Trump’s hands are very discolored today and one of his hands appears to be bruised as well.

Is he getting close to death? 🤞🏽

(Anna Moneymaker/Getty) pic.twitter.com/703Rl7LIiR

— Lucas Sanders 👊🏽🔥🇺🇸 (@LucasSa56947288) May 6, 2026

The bruises! The horror!

It’s no secret, first, that Donald Trump shakes a lot of hands. Last month, according to Forbes, the president’s personal physician attributed the bruises to “minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking,” according to Forbes.

It’s also no secret that Donald Trump is getting older, and older people bruise more. Rare is the person who becomes stronger as they enter their later years, and the president is no exception — although he certainly seems mentally fit enough to do the job, more so than that “beer brewed here” guy, and especially if the evidence at hand (pun unintended) is just a few bruises.

But this isn’t age. Consider that this happened to a 42-year-old beloved by liberals until a bullet took his life during the 1968 presidential campaign: Robert F. Kennedy, then a senator from New York.

From a Literary Hub article on RFK Sr.’s last few days on the campaign trail in California before the primary there:

Everywhere he went that spring it was the same: each night his hands would be chafed and bleeding. He made physical contact with more individuals during those few frenetic months than most people do in a lifetime.

I can think of one person who’s almost certainly shaken more hands: President Donald Trump.

No one thinks that Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was too old for the job. In fact, the knock on him was quite the opposite: He was an inexperienced candidate who relied more on what now gets called “vibes” to throw together an eclectic coalition of hippies and hard hats who believed the Vietnam War was a lost cause and America had better priorities than on any actual concrete policies.

Nobody thought he was in ill health, either. Nor did they think that his mind was going. (Quite the opposite, given this was just months after his on-the-spot eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr. the night he was murdered; love the man or loathe him, you cannot deny that the speech itself was one of the finest examples of extemporaneous public address in recorded American history.)

And they didn’t think that his hands being chafed and bleeding were the key to some strange mythology about RFK’s health. In fact, Literary Hub published the revelation as part of an unabashed 2018 hagiography titled “The Last Days of Robert F. Kennedy: On the Radical Compassion of an American Icon.”

But bruising because Donald Trump shakes too many hands? Must be fatal. Hilariously, these claims are very often made by the same people who wonder, in just a few breaths more, where the injury was to Trump’s ear, under the assumption that the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt was faked. Without the double standards at work here, standards would (as usual) be thrown out the window.

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