Maria Shriver Opens Up About ‘Tumultuous’ Year Under Trump and Urges Unity amid ‘Scary’ Times

Maria Shriver is calling on Americans to come together, even as the country faces deep strain at home and uncertainty abroad.

In an essay published in her Sunday Paper, the 70-year-old author and journalist reflected on the state of the United States while looking ahead to the nation’s 250th birthday this summer and observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Rather than giving in to despair, Shriver challenged readers to resist hopelessness and, instead, “come together to create a new vision for who we are and what we want to stand for.”

In her message shared Saturday, Jan. 17, Shriver also offered a simple, personal action step: take 20 minutes sometime over the next few weeks and write a letter to America.

“Write what has broken your heart and where you still see the light,” she encouraged. “Write what you hope for America’s values, her leaders, her character, and her future. Write not only what you are asking of America, but what you are willing to give to her as well. Make it your manifestation for our country.”

Shriver urged readers not to keep those words private.

“Share it with your family. Share it with your friends. Share it with us in the comments below,” she wrote. “Then speak it out loud and manifest it into existence. This is how we make the country ours again. This is how we rise—not as factions, not as parties, but as people.”

She then turned to her family history, invoking her uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, and quoting from a speech he had prepared before his assassination in 1963:

“There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side, and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable. … We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.”

From there, Shriver framed her own message as both a rebuke and a reminder.

“My friends, we are better than the nonsense spewing out at us today. We deserve so much better,” she wrote. “I hope that we can transcend the prevailing nonsense and ask more from those who want to lead us forward—and expect more from ourselves as well.”

Shriver also reflected on the loss of friends Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner, who were found dead in their home last month. She wrote that, before they died, the couple had spent years working on progressive causes and had recently envisioned an idea she found especially moving: a campaign where “America herself was the candidate.”

“They dreamt of that because they believed America belonged to all of us and that we can all get behind her,” Shriver wrote. “I loved that idea then, and I believe in it even more now.”

She added that her closest circle crosses political lines.

“I have friends who are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, but they are first and foremost Americans,” she wrote. “And they know deep in their hearts that division, contempt, fanaticism, and fear are weakening the very thing that makes America strong and beautiful.”

Her call for unity arrives amid broader public criticism from Shriver and other Kennedy relatives over President Donald Trump’s decision to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as the Trump-Kennedy Center. Shriver described the move as “weird,” arguing that attaching Trump’s name to a living memorial dedicated to Kennedy diminishes the dignity of the institution.

“C’mon, my fellow Americans! Wake up! This is not dignified. This is not funny. This is way beneath the stature of the job. It’s downright weird,” she wrote on Instagram last month. “It’s obsessive in a weird way. Just when you think somone [sic] can’t stoop any lower, down they go…”

Shriver and her family have also been grieving another recent loss: Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy. Schlossberg died Dec. 30, 2025, after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

In an Instagram post shared the day Schlossberg died, Shriver sent her love to Caroline and remembered Schlossberg—who wrote about the environment—as “a great journalist” who “used her words to educate others about the earth and how to save it.”

“I cannot make sense of this. I cannot make any sense of it at all,” Shriver wrote. “None. Zero.”