But Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy—as I’ve referred to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since we met freshman year at Harvard—have always had many features in common as well. Both are entitled playboy sons of northeastern wealth; both (in Michelle Obama’s words) were “afforded the grace of failing forward” as misbehaving, underachieving adolescents admitted to Ivy League colleges thanks to “the affirmative action of generational wealth”; both were reckless lifelong adolescents, both attention-craving philanderers and liars, both jerks. And Kennedy’s hour-long speech today was nearly as meandering and filled with lies as any average hour of Trump.
Kennedy had promised to be “the best environmental president in American history.” For decades, as an attorney and celebrity activist, he urged more vigorous enforcement of federal regulations guaranteeing clean air and water.
Now he joins a campaign whose policies, according to critics, would scale back those regulations and weaken the agencies that uphold them.