The peril of RFK Jr.

Lord, it’s got to be hard to be a Kennedy right now.

It’s looking increasingly like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is more than fine with putting Donald Trump back in the White House. And the kookiest Kennedy is using the storied family name to make it so.

A mountain of reporting, most recently in the New York Times, has shown that Kennedy’s campaign is being partly propped up by Trump-backing donors and strategists, who believe the scion of this famously Democratic family takes more votes from President Biden than from the disgraced former president. MAGA extremist Steve Bannon, for example, has made no attempt to hide his eagerness for Kennedy to run.

Kennedy’s family has tried to stop him. “I’ve talked to Bobby about what I thought was likely to be an incredibly brutal and personal campaign ... if he went forward with his candidacy,” said his nephew, former representative Joe Kennedy III, whose own campaign against incumbent US Senator Ed Markey got brutal and personal. And Joe had no skeletons hidden away, unlike his uncle, who struggled through years of drug abuse and messy personal relationships in the wake of his father RFK’s assassination in 1968.

His family is worried about what the inevitable attacks on Bobby will do to him and his children. They’re also worried about what it will do to the country: Tip the election to Trump, whose repressive plans for a second term are absolutely dystopian.

“Bobby’s candidacy represents viewpoints and policies that I don’t share, and I don’t believe should be held by a president of the United States,” Joe Kennedy III said. “As his own campaign has indicated, his candidacy is likely to result in the election of Trump … a grave threat to our country.”

How upsetting it must be to see Bobby multiply that threat by twisting what is left of the family’s legacy to his cause, contorting the historical record in ways that would make a pretzel blush. The independent presidential candidate chose to kick off his campaign in Boston, where his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and his father RFK were born, and at the Park Plaza, where his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, regularly held events.

Before that, RFK Jr. was merely an accomplished crackpot and influential antivaxxer. The COVID pandemic supercharged his fevered delusions, allowing him to preach deadly junk science to millions and unite conspiracists of all denominations under one flag.

Bobby is the embodiment of the horseshoe theory: The notion that the extreme left and the extreme right in politics have an awful lot in common. Kennedy came up as an environmental activist and rails against corporate power, but he also inveighs against government overreach, parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points on Ukraine, and speaks of injustice against Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

In case you missed that last one, he suggested last week that the prosecutions of Jan. 6 defendants were politically motivated.

He has also suggested his late father and uncle would have walked away from today’s Democratic Party, which — look, obviously, no.

Everybody knows RFK Jr. — who is garnering support in the teens right now — would be drawing polling numbers as lousy as egomaniacal Green Party candidate Jill Stein if it wasn’t for his last name. And that includes the candidate himself. Man, that Super Bowl ad was really something, wasn’t it? It used a colorized version of JFK’s 1960 “Kennedy for Me” ad, subbing Bobby’s image for his uncle’s. The candidate apologized and said he’d had nothing to do with the spot, but he proudly placed the ad at the top of his Twitter page after it aired, and eventually chose Nicole Shanahan, who helped create and pay for the $7 million spot, as his running mate.

Expect him to keep deploying the family lore to his cause — and expect the rest of his family to keep pushing back, gently and firmly. They’ve made clear their support for Biden, appearing at the White House with the president, with whom the family has long personal and political connections.

Clearly, none of Bobby’s relatives want it to end this way, with their name and their story being used to help usher in the most extreme Republican administration in history.

That would be a tragedy, for a family that has seen more than its share of them.