# FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY: JOHN NEELY KENNEDY NAMED ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S “TOP 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2025”

**By National Affairs Desk**
*November 8, 2025*

The Grand Ballroom of the Willard InterContinental was packed tighter than a Louisiana crawfish boil in May. Senators, governors, cable anchors, and a smattering of Hollywood liberals who still pretended to understand Cajun humor milled beneath crystal chandeliers. They had come for TIME’s annual gala unveiling its “100 Most Influential People” list, an event that had long ago morphed from journalistic exercise into Washington’s most coveted red-carpet ritual.

At 8:42 p.m., the lights dimmed. A spotlight hit the stage. Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs stepped to the podium in a midnight-blue tuxedo and began reading names in alphabetical order. Applause rippled politely for a tech billionaire, a pop star, a climate activist. Then he reached the K’s.

“From the bayous of Madison Parish to the marble corridors of the United States Senate,” Jacobs intoned, “a man who speaks in parables, quotes Scripture, and dismantles billion-dollar bureaucracies with a twang sharp enough to slice andouille. For the first time in his 76 years, and for the first time in the history of this list from the state of Louisiana—Senator John Neely Kennedy.”

The room did not gasp. It did not cheer. It rose. Every soul—Democrat, Republican, lobbyist, correspondent—stood in a single motion, the way congregations stand for the Gospel. Not out of surprise, but out of respect. The ovation lasted 47 seconds, long enough for Kennedy himself, seated at Table 12 between Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and actor Matthew McConaughey, to blush the color of a Creole tomato.

Kennedy unfolded his lanky frame, adjusted the crimson tie his wife Becky had knotted that morning, and ambled to the stage with the unhurried gait of a man who once walked soybean rows at dawn. He did not wave. He simply placed both palms on the podium, looked out over the sea of tuxedos and sequins, and drawled, “Well, I reckon my mama’s gonna need a bigger mantel.”

Laughter detonated. The ice officially broke.

But the moment belonged to more than punchlines. It marked the culmination of a political odyssey no algorithm could have predicted when Kennedy first ran for Louisiana state treasurer in 1999 as a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat. Back then, his Yale Law pedigree and Rhodes Scholar résumé made him the ultimate insider-outsider: a Phi Beta Kappa son of Winnfield who could quote Thucydides in one breath and Duck Dynasty in the next.

TIME’s citation, penned by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, called Kennedy “the last American populist who can still make Washington laugh at itself without losing its soul.” The magazine highlighted three pillars of his 2025 influence: legislative craftsmanship, cultural translation, and moral clarity in an age of algorithmic outrage.

First, the legislation. In March, Kennedy shepherded the American Energy Independence Act through a 50-50 Senate, securing the tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance after a 14-hour filibuster by Bernie Sanders. The bill reopened ANWR drilling, funded 2,000 miles of carbon-capture pipelines, and—most improbably—passed with 11 Democratic votes by including $40 billion in Gulf Coast wetland restoration. Environmentalists howled. Blue-collar unions sent thank-you fruit baskets the size of compact cars. Kennedy’s explanation? “I didn’t write it for the Sierra Club or the drillers. I wrote it for the shrimpers in Dulac who can’t afford another dead zone.”

Second, the translation. In an era when coastal elites and heartland voters speak mutually incomprehensible dialects, Kennedy became the bilingual savant. On CNN he could dissect monetary policy with the precision of a Fed governor. On Fox he’d pivot to, “Inflation’s like a raccoon in your henhouse—cute till it starts eatin’ your future.” His weekly “Bayou Briefings”—five-minute YouTube dispatches filmed on a johnboat—averaged 8.2 million views, outpacing most Sunday shows. Linguists at Stanford studied his syntax; late-night hosts mined it for monologues. Yet the message never changed: government is a necessary evil, and evil is what happens when it forgets the “necessary” part.

Third, the clarity. When a TikTok influencer with 40 million followers called for “defunding the police” in July, Kennedy invited her to Baton Rouge for a ride-along with the sheriff’s deputy who’d once pulled his own nephew from a burning car. The resulting documentary, *Thin Gumbo Line*, won a Student Academy Award and quietly shifted Gen-Z opinion on law enforcement by nine points, per Gallup. Kennedy refused to gloat. “I didn’t convert her,” he told reporters. “I just let her meet the people she was tweeting about.”

The gala crowd expected a stem-winder when Kennedy took the mic. Instead he told a story.

“In 1968,” he began, “I was 16, working the register at my daddy’s feed store. A man came in wearing a suit too fine for dust and sweat. Said he was from Washington, needed 50 sacks of layer mash for a federal program. Daddy asked cash or charge. Man said, ‘Neither—Uncle Sam’s paying.’ Daddy looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘Son, Uncle Sam’s my brother, and he ain’t never bought me dinner.’”

The room roared. Kennedy waited.

“Tonight,” he continued, voice softening, “I reckon Uncle Sam finally picked up the tab. But influence ain’t about who foots the bill. It’s about who remembers the hunger that made you grateful when the plate arrived.”

He stepped back. No policy pronouncements. No victory lap. Just a nod to the Louisianans in the back—shrimpers, roughnecks, a nun from his high school—who’d flown in on their own dime.

Backstage, Jacobs handed Kennedy the crystal obelisk engraved with his name. The senator turned it over, squinting. “Y’all sure this ain’t just a fancy paperweight?”

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“It’s whatever you make it,” Jacobs replied.

Kennedy tucked it under his arm like a sack of rice. “Then I’ll make it a doorstop for every bureaucrat who forgets the door swings both ways.”

By midnight, the hashtag #Kennedy100 was trending above Taylor Swift’s album drop. Clips of the standing ovation racked up 22 million views. Pundits debated whether the honor signaled GOP realignment, Southern resurgence, or simply the triumph of authenticity in a synthetic age.

At 12:47 a.m., Kennedy slipped out a service exit. A Town Car waited to take him to Dulles for the red-eye to Baton Rouge. Before climbing in, he paused under the awning, looked up at the marble arch, and muttered to no one in particular, “Lord, if this is influence, don’t let it go to my head. I still gotta face Miss Lorraine at church come Sunday, and she’ll tan my hide if I get too big for my britches.”

The driver asked if he wanted the partition up. Kennedy waved it off. “Naw, son. Keep it down. I might need to practice humility out loud.”

As the car merged onto Constitution Avenue, the obelisk glinted in the streetlights—less trophy, more compass. For the first time in history, a man who once registered voters door-to-door in a pickup truck now carried the weight of a nation’s attention. And if the past was prologue, John Neely Kennedy would spend every ounce of that influence reminding America that power, like crawfish, is better the closer it stays to the mud it came from