Cheryl Hines Says She Broke Out in Hives After Meeting Donald Trump

Cheryl Hines is revealing the swift reaction she experienced the first time she met President Donald Trump.

In her new memoir Unscripted, the wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recalled meeting Trump shortly after he was targeted in an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July 2024. At the time, Kennedy had not yet dropped out of the presidential race, but Hines wrote that Trump called and asked Kennedy to fly out and meet him in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention would soon begin.

Hines booked her own flight to Milwaukee so she “could meet Bobby as soon as he got out of his meeting with President Trump,” she wrote — but her husband’s security team brought her right to the meeting after Kennedy requested her presence there. She was escorted to a hotel suite, where she shook hands with Trump and he detailed the assassination attempt.

In the meeting, Trump said he believed Kennedy needed to have Secret Service protection, which he then dictated to Susie Wiles — who is Trump’s current chief of staff — and posted a message on Truth Social, too, Hines wrote.

At the time, Joe Biden was president and Trump did not have the power to grant Secret Service protection.

“The moment I stepped out of the hotel suite, I broke out into hives. I’ve never broken out in hives before, not once, but suddenly I had hives all up and down my arms and I could feel them making their way across my abdomen,” Hines recalled.

“Was I allergic to something there? That night, one of Bobby’s staff joked that I must’ve been allergic to President Trump,” she wrote.

Just 20 minutes after Trump’s tweet, Hines said she and her husband were informed he would be receiving Secret Service detail after then-President Biden issued a presidential order — but she soon learned that because the protection was granted through an executive order, only Kennedy would be protected.

“That meant that our immediate family, the kids and I, would not be protected even though this was customary for all other nominees’ families. As they talked, I could feel my hives make their way down my legs,” she wrote.

The hives showed no signs of calming down as the Secret Service talked about conducting bomb sweeps in her home with Kennedy, Hines recalled.

“My hives were going strong,” Hines wrote. At dinner that night with her husband and his team, Hines looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and saw that her “bottom lip had swelled to the size of a baby carrot.”

“Was I still having an allergic reaction to something?” she wrote. “(It couldn’t have been President Trump, he was on the other side of Milwaukee.) Between my hives and my swollen lip, I was really a sight to see.”

Hines and her husband returned to their hotel room after dinner, where they called doctors for advice. While keeping an eye on her lip, she took Benadryl and sat in a Himalayan salt bath.

“My upper lip started to get involved and my bottom lip was close to splitting in two,” she recalled. “I looked like a casualty from Botched, the show about plastic surgery gone wrong.”

Hines then arrived at a “walk-in emergency facility,” where the doctor ruled out an allergic reaction, but asked her, “Have you been under more stress than usual lately?”

When she told him yes, he replied, “I’d advise you to try to find a way to not be so stressed. Your body is trying to tell you something.”

Hines wrote that she promised the doctor, “I’ll work on that,” and was given steroids and an EpiPen as a precautionary measure.

“I flew home with my EpiPen in one hand and hiding my crazy lips with the other,” she wrote. “I took note every time I swallowed to see if I could feel my throat closing up or not. It was the perfect kick-off to my new effort in finding a way to be less stressed, as the doctor suggested. This was going to be easy.”

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Hines has been on a media tour promoting her book, and recently appeared on The View. Not long after her Oct. 14 appearance on the show, Hines questioned if the co-hosts read her book before she came on, and accused them of only wanting to “grill” her about Kennedy.

“You know, I was actually hoping that it was going to be more personal on The View,” Hines said on the Hot Mics with Billy Bush podcast. “But it was what it was.”

She added, “I mean, I don’t think the ladies on The View asked me one question about my book. But, you know, that’s okay.”