Hollywood has never been shy about its feelings toward President Donald Trump, but Mark Ruffalo just took things to a whole new level.
The Avengers star fired off a text to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr calling the President of the United States “the stupidest man in America.”
Kennedy had a quick response ready — and Ruffalo probably didn’t love hearing it.
The Text That Started It All
Kennedy went on the Fly Zone USA podcast recently and let the cat out of the bag about a private texting exchange with the actor.
“I was texting with Mark Ruffalo the other day, he’s very mad at me,” Kennedy told host Christian “Trick Trick” Mathis.
Mathis didn’t quite believe who he was hearing about at first. He jumped in and asked, “Incredible Hulk?” — and cracked up when Kennedy confirmed it was indeed the Marvel star on the other end of those texts.
“He’s got really bad Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Kennedy said flatly.
And then came the specific charge Ruffalo lobbed at the President. Kennedy recounted that Ruffalo told him, “You’re working for the stupidest man in America.”
Kennedy didn’t let that one slide. He acknowledged that he used to think something similar — before he actually got to know Trump.
“Now you can say a lot about Trump — and a lot of Democrats believe he’s stupid — and I actually at one point believed that,” Kennedy said. “I believed he’s very superficial, he probably hasn’t read a book. Now that I know him, he has like an encyclopedic mind.”
What Kennedy Says He Saw Up Close
Kennedy went on to describe a President who knows a staggering amount across a wide range of subjects — music, theater, sports, Wall Street deal-making, foreign policy.
He knows everything about sports. He knows everything about Wall Street, who made their money, how they made the money, what the deals look like.
But the most striking story Kennedy told was from a flight during the campaign. The two sat across from each other, and the conversation turned to Syria.
Kennedy described what happened next: Trump grabbed a placemat, flipped it over, took a Sharpie, and “drew a perfect map of the Mid East.” Then he put the troop strength of every country on every border on that map.
“He has this extraordinary depth of knowledge about what’s happening in each one of the agencies,” Kennedy said.
That’s not the portrait of a man that fits the caricature Hollywood has been selling for years. And Kennedy, who spent a good part of his career as a Democrat and environmental activist, is not exactly a lifelong Trump cheerleader. The fact that he walked away from his own prior assumptions says something.
But Ruffalo isn’t interested in any of that.
Ruffalo’s Record Speaks for Itself
The Shutter Island star has branded Trump a “pedophile,” a “convicted rapist,” and a “grifter” over the years, as well as called the President “public enemy number one.”
At a “No Kings” rally, Ruffalo told attendees that Trump had “made himself a king and dictator.”
Trump has scoffed at protesters like Ruffalo before, saying, “I’m not a king — I work my ass off to make our country great, that’s all it is. I’m not a king, at all.”
And Kennedy, for his part, is not the first person to raise the alarm about TDS becoming something more than a punchline. He has previously told his staff that Trump Derangement Syndrome needs an official ICD code — the classification system used by doctors to identify real medical conditions — because, as he put it, “it is a real thing.”
Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert has made a similar case, telling Fox News Digital that TDS “is a profound pathology” and that it affects roughly 75% of his liberal patients in Manhattan.
Whether or not you put a clinical label on it, the pattern is hard to miss. Ruffalo has spent years lobbing increasingly extreme attacks at Trump — attacks that have drawn White House responses, earned him a reputation as one of Hollywood’s loudest anti-Trump voices, and apparently cost him at least one friendship with a sitting Cabinet secretary.
What This Really Tells You
There’s something worth sitting with here. Kennedy is not a partisan Republican. He ran as an independent in 2024. He spent decades in the environmental left and has butted heads with the medical establishment on vaccine policy in ways that made him a target of the very institutions Ruffalo cheers for.
But after spending real time with Trump — on planes, in meetings, inside the machinery of governing — Kennedy came away with a completely different picture than the one the media and Hollywood have been painting for a decade.
Ruffalo, by contrast, fires off texts calling Trump “the stupidest man in America” while standing at rallies comparing him to a king. He hasn’t updated his priors. He isn’t curious about whether the portrait he’s been handed is accurate. He just keeps swinging.
That’s the thing about TDS that Kennedy is really putting his finger on. It isn’t just anger. It’s a closed loop — a place where no new information gets in and no old assumption gets questioned.
Kennedy spent years inside that loop himself. He admits it. And then he flew on a plane with the man, watched him draw a map of the Middle East from memory with a Sharpie on a placemat, and started asking himself whether everything he had been told was true.
Ruffalo isn’t asking that question. And that’s the diagnosis.
Hollywood has been running this playbook since 2015 — the insults, the rallies, the social media posts, the red carpet speeches. And Trump just keeps winning. At some point, the people who keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result might want to consider whether the problem is the man they’re attacking, or the strategy they can’t stop using.
Kennedy at least had the intellectual honesty to change his mind when the facts changed. That’s worth something, even if it earns him angry texts from the Incredible Hulk.
Sources: Mediaite; Fox News Digital; meaww.com; tyla.com