RFK Jr., Bobby Kennedy was everything you aren't. You've betrayed your father's legacy.

How could you, Bobby Jr.?

That’s the question every scholar of the Kennedys is asking who recalls how much you adored your namesake father – and how much your father’s life centered around three totems: the Democratic Party, the Kennedy family and God.

You have abandoned them all.

We’re dumbfounded not just by your endorsing a Republican for president, but also your embracing a demagogue like Donald Trump who has defamed the Kennedys as “a bunch of lunatics.”

What happened to the RFK Jr. who loved animals?

Ever since you were a kid, the environment was your absolute passion, Bobby. Remember the red-tailed hawk you adopted, kept in your boyhood bedroom and named Morgan le Fay, after the sorceress in the Arthurian legend?

And thanks to you, the family compound at Hickory Hill in Northern Virginia also witnessed a parade of homing pigeons, iguanas, raccoons, possums, cockatoos, squirrels, mice, rats, ducks, rabbits, parakeets, hamsters, geese, chickens, roosters, guinea pigs, lizards, a 4-H calf and a leopard tortoise brought from Kenya in a suitcase that was unusable afterward.

How can you square that love, which became your life’s work at the Waterkeeper Alliance, with backing an ex-president who has dismissed climate change as a “hoax,” vows to roll back the environmental protections you labored for and whose energy policy centers around the battle cry “drill, baby, drill”?

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Although maybe your veneration of the environment – and animals – aren’t as deep as we thought. New Yorker writer Clare Malone has recounted how in 2014 you picked up roadkill, a dead bear cub, and drove it into Manhattan and staged a Central Park scene to look like it was killed by a bicyclist. You even released a video telling Roseanne Barr about it.

Then this week, an environmental group called for a government investigation after a 2012 magazine interview resurfaced in which your daughter said you used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a dead whale.

Turning your back on the values of Robert F. Kennedy Sr.

When did your politics veer to the right and into the Trump speed lane?

Not even the ex-president has gone as far as you in denying the efficacy of lifesaving vaccines. You’re on board with sealing the borders to immigrants whom your uncle Jack trumpeted as the backbone of this nation ? and ending aid to Ukrainians waging war for the political freedom your dad made the cornerstone of his career.

It's not just your backing a race-baiting Republican that has fans of your father shell-shocked, but also turning your back on a Democratic ticket that loudly echoes precisely what the original RFK championed in his campaign for president in 1968. He ran as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor and the last progressive knight.

His romantic vision for America and the planet made Robert Francis Kennedy the uncommon optimist in an age of political distrust. It would later inspire Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris in their spirited runs for the White House.

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“Each time a man stands up for an ideal,” RFK reminded us, “he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

No wonder his audiences swooned.

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RFK Sr. moved in precisely the opposite direction you are, Junior, transforming from cold warrior to hot-blooded liberal. Unlike the divisive Donald Trump, the Bobby Kennedy of 1968 was a builder of bridges – between islands of Black, brown and blue-collar folks, between terrified parents and estranged youths, and between the establishment he had grown up in versus the new politics he heralded.

You once recalled how, when your father piled you and your siblings into the family station wagon for the ride to church, he “always carried a Bible with him.” And “when the priest started talking about the right-wing stuff he would pointedly read the Bible or he would read the Catholic newspapers at the back of the church.”

Now you’re embracing that very right-wing stuff, to the point where nearly all your siblings felt the need Friday to denounce your staining of what the Kennedy name stands for: “Our brother Bobby's decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Are you really so desperate for attention – or a job – that you are doing this? Is it resenting the spotlight that has shined on your sisters, brothers and cousins, and reasoning that this radical turnaround is the way to make your own headlines? Or is it simply seeking some way to measure up to the fame you inherited by virtue of your name?

Whatever the motivation, the result, as your siblings say, is sad.

Journalist Larry Tye is the author of nine books, including "Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon."

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: RFK Jr. endorsing Trump betrays his father and the Kennedy legacy