I’m heartbroken over my brother Bobby’s endorsement of Donald Trump.

I think often about my father and how he might have viewed the politics of our time. I’m not sure what he would have thought about TikTok or AI, but this much I know for sure: He would have despised Donald Trump.

Trump was exactly the kind of arrogant, entitled bully my father used to prosecute. Robert F. Kennedy’s life was dedicated to promoting the safety, security and happiness of the American people. That is why he would have so admired another former prosecutor, Kamala Harris. Her career, like his, has been all about decency, dignity, equality, democracy and justice for all.

Trump is the enemy of all that. The only thing he seems to be for is himself and, disturbingly, autocrats such as Vladimir Putin, whom my father would have regarded as an existential threat to our country.

Yet my brother now endorses Trump. To pledge allegiance to Trump, a man who demonstrates no adherence to our family’s values, is inconceivable to me.

Worse, it is sordid. Earlier this month, as Harris surged in the polls, my brother offered her his endorsement in exchange for a position in her coming administration. He got no response.

Now he has offered that same deal to Trump. His is a hollow grab for power, a strategic attempt at relevance. It is the opposite of what my father admired: “the unselfish spirit that exists in the United States of America.”

It is all the more tragic because of our brother’s name. To carry the name Robert F. Kennedy Jr. means a special legacy within a legacy. It would strongly imply a desire to carry on our father’s work. But Bobby’s alliance with Trump puts this in jeopardy.

Let me go through the record.

My father was an anti-racist who joined the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in common cause, and forged a powerful bond with African Americans everywhere he went in 1968.

Donald Trump is a lifelong racist whose entire career has been shaped by his dislike of people with a different skin color.

My father believed in expanding legal immigration because he came from an immigrant family and knew how much talent and drive hard-working families bring if we open our doors to them.

Donald Trump stirs up hatred of immigrants, whom he mischaracterizes as criminals and drug addicts.

My father believed in the rule of law, as a prosecutor, and as the attorney general of the United States.

Donald Trump has contempt for the law, as evidenced by his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election and his ongoing legal struggles. He is the first felon to run as a serious candidate for the presidency.

My father believed in bringing Americans together. He said, “I don’t think that we have to shoot at each other, to beat each other, to curse each other and criticize each other, I think that we can do better in this country.”

Donald Trump’s entire campaign is about stoking division.

My father loved the priceless inheritance of our land and water and surely was an environmentalist in his way, even if the term did not catch on until later.

It feels especially hypocritical that Bobby, a genuine environmentalist, has thrown in with the most anti-environmental president in our history, who promises to “drill, baby, drill” if elected.

My father was against the “mindless menace” of gun violence. Donald Trump is against any meaningful form of regulating guns.

My father believed in democracy. Donald Trump does not.

My father believed in the truth. Donald Trump does not.

At the University of Kansas, on March 18, 1968, my father said, “[W]e as a people, are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand. This country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the president of the United States.”

The truth is essential to democracy. And truth is essential inside a family, too. For all of these reasons, the truth requires me to set the record clear. I love Bobby. But I hate what he is doing to our country. It is worse than disappointment. We are in mourning.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be motivated to write something of this nature. With a heavy heart, I am today asking my fellow Americans to do what will honor our father the most: Ignore Bobby and support Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic platform. It’s what is best for our country.

As my father said, in a campaign of his own, “I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.”

Max Kennedy is an author, an attorney and the ninth child of Ethel and Robert Kennedy. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Vicki.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is facing another accusation of misrepresenting his background after a Nebraska Chamber of Commerce letter from 2006 resurfaced amid Walz’s campaign for vice president. 

When Walz first ran for Congress in Minnesota, he touted on his campaign website that he received an award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce in 1993 for his work with the business community, according to a 2006 article from the Post Bulletin. 

He never received such an award, however, which was outlined to him in a blistering letter from the then-president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce, Barry L. Kennedy. 

“We researched this matter and can confirm that you have not been the recipient of any award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce,” the letter addressed to Walz on Nov. 1, 2006, reads. 

FLASHBACK: OBAMA WAS ONE OF EARLIEST BIG-NAME DEMS TO ENDORSE WALZ AT DAWN OF HIS POLITICAL CAREER

“I am not going to draw a conclusion about your intentions by including this line in your biography. However, we respectfully request that you remove any reference to our organization as it could be considered an endorsement of your candidacy. It should be pointed out, however, that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has endorsed your opponent, Congressman Gil Gutknecht, for his support of small business issues,” Kennedy continued. 

The letter was unearthed by Minnesota outlet Alpha News last week, after the controversy gained traction locally in 2006. 

TIM WALZ SLAMMED AS ‘POLITICAL CHAMELEON’ AFTER DITCHING FORMER PRO-SECOND AMENDMENT STANCE

The Post Bulletin, a Minnesota newspaper based in Rochester, reported in 2006 that Walz’s congressional campaign updated its website to reflect Walz did not win a Nebraska Chamber of Commerce award, but had won an award from the Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce, known as the Jaycees. The then-campaign manager passed off the issue as a “typographical error,” the outlet reported at the time. 

When approached by Fox Digital about the 2006 controversy, the Harris-Walz campaign said Walz frequently speaks “openly and off the cuff.”

“Governor Walz speaks the way real people speak – openly and off the cuff. The American people appreciate that Gov. Walz tells it like it is and doesn’t talk like a politician, and they appreciate the difference between someone who occasionally misspeaks and a pathological liar like Donald Trump,” the campaign said. 

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, hold a campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Aug. 20, 2024. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

The claim follows a long history of people accusing Walz of misrepresenting himself and his history, most notably a bevy of veterans accusing the Gopher State Democrat of misrepresenting his military career. 

Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard before retiring in 2005, when he launched a successful congressional campaign and served as a member of the U.S. House representing Minnesota from 2007 until 2019. 

Following Vice President Kamala Harris naming him as her running mate, Walz has been slammed by a number of veterans for allegedly misrepresenting his service in the military, including identifying himself to the public as a retired “Command Sergeant Major.”

TRUMP CAMP SAYS HARRIS-WALZ ‘DANGEROUSLY LIBERAL’ TICKET IS ‘EVERY AMERICAN’S NIGHTMARE’

Walz was promoted to the command sergeant major rank following a deployment to Italy in 2004, but he did not complete coursework with the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy to retain the rank in retirement. Walz instead retired as a master sergeant, one pay grade below command sergeant major. 

“For 20 years, they let this guy go by with a lie that he deployed to Iraq, which he didn’t, and that he retired as a command sergeant major, which he did not. I mean, that’s just blatant lies,” Republican Virginia Senate candidate Hung Cao, a retired Navy captain, told The New York Post this month of Walz. 

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz speaks during a campaign rally at Temple University on Aug. 6, 2024, in Philadelphia. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The battalion commander of Walz’s former Minnesota Army National Guard unit also issued a scathing message to Harris’ running mate earlier this month regarding him portraying himself as a “retired Command Sergeant Major.” 

VAN JONES: WALZ NEEDS TO ADMIT HE EXAGGERATED MILITARY RECORD SO DEMS CAN ‘MOVE ON’

“He did not earn the rank or successfully complete any assignment as an E9,” John Kolb, who served as a lieutenant colonel of the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery from 2005 to 2007, wrote in a social media post this month. “It is an affront to the Noncommissioned Officer Corps that he continues to glom onto the title. I can sit in the cockpit of an airplane, it does not make me a pilot. Similarly, when the demands of service and leadership at the highest level got real, he chose another path.”

The “retired Command Sergeant Major” rank was promoted by the Harris campaign until earlier this month, when it changed Walz’s biography on the campaign’s website to read that he “served as a command sergeant major.”

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

When Kamala Harris was formally installed as the Democratic presidential nominee, her home-state delegation had the best seats in the house, right up front.

Visions of the Golden State and a parade of its personalities filled the convention’s four-day program, and passes to California’s after-parties — featuring appearances by John Legend, the Killers and Oakland’s Tony! Toni! Toné — were among the hottest tickets in Chicago.

Suddenly, California is at the center of politics, in a way the nation’s most important and populous state hasn’t been since former Gov. Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

A California Democrat sits atop the party’s presidential ticket for the first time in history, thanks in good part to the machinations of another California Democrat who helped elbow the incumbent — and nominee-in-waiting — aside.

“California is having a moment,” said Don Sipple, a political strategist who helped elect several of the state’s governors, because of “the woman who opened the door and the woman who walked through it.”

(Though, it should be noted, the door-opening woman, Nancy Pelosi, and Harris have never been close. The former House speaker publicly spoke of an “open process” to replace President Biden before endorsing his vice president as the best alternative after Biden gave up his reelection bid.)

With heightened attention comes greater scrutiny, and with that added scrutiny comes a fight to define California — and, by extension, Harris — for the rest of America.

The outcome could very well determine who wins in November.

Is California a sun-kissed incubator of innovation and opportunity that continues to beckon doers and dreamers from the world over, as it has for well over 150 years?

Or is it an overburdened and overstretched collection of struggling communities that fail to provide even the basics — safety, clean shelter, sustaining livelihoods — for a shamefully large portion of its population?

Yes and yes.

“There is plenty of evidence” to support both views, said Jack Pitney, a former Republican operative and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. He paraphrased Walt Whitman.

“California is large. It contains multitudes,” Pitney said. “It is possible for two things to be true at once.”

Red and blue America. Prosperous and failing California. Two ways of seeing the same thing.

Bill Carrick, longtime political advisor to the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, scoffed at the notion that Harris’ home state will hang like a millstone around the vice president’s neck.

“Ultimately, a presidential campaign is about picking someone who you think will make your life better,” said Carrick, who has worked extensively in national politics. It’s not, he said, about a candidate’s return address.

Sure, Carrick went on, “there are some ideological Republicans who are devoted to Trump” and who eagerly lap up the California-as-hellhole narrative — but “we’re not going to get them anyway.”

Most voters, or at least those who are open to supporting Harris, know very little about the vice president. That, Carrick said, gives her an opportunity to introduce herself — and her home state — on her own terms, “as opposed to the Republican cartoon characterization.”

Maybe so.

But Trump and his fellow Republicans, abetted by Fox News and other sympathetic media, will make a case that California is a case study in what goes wrong when Democrats are put in charge. They will hold up Harris, a statewide officeholder for more than a dozen years, as the prime example of its destructive ruling class.

That vastly overstates her power and influence, first as attorney general and then for a relatively brief stint as one of California’s two U.S. senators. But that detail will surely be lost in the fog of campaign warfare.

Harris is, however, an exemplar of her home state in one significant way.

There’s no doubting she reflects the politics and makeup of modern California, just as the two presidents the state yielded, Reagan and Richard M. Nixon, embodied the California of their day and age.

The two men rose to power at a time when California was mostly white and reliably Republican, with a broad and deep conservative streak. By the time Harris arrived in Sacramento after being elected attorney general in 2010, the state was solidly Democratic, increasingly liberal and had more Black and brown than white residents. Not least, there were also significantly more opportunities for a woman in politics.

In that way, Harris and Reagan serve as perfect bookends to the state they represented.

Given the changes of the last 30-plus years, it’s surprising California Democrats haven’t managed to put one of their own in the White House, said Jim Newton, a biographer and state historian.

“We think of it as such an exceptionally blue place,” he said, “and it’s produced so many national Democratic leaders.”

Among them, the legendarily powerful Rep. Phillip Burton, Pelosi (who succeeded Burton’s widow in representing San Francisco in Congress), and Feinstein. But until Biden chose Harris as his running mate, no California Democrat had come remotely near the White House, though several tried.

Of course, Harris wouldn’t have this shot at the presidency but for a unique set of circumstances. If Biden hadn’t performed so terribly in that June debate, if Democrats hadn’t panicked afterward, if Pelosi and other party leaders hadn’t maneuvered to shove the president aside, the vice president could very well have been out of a job come January.

That still might happen. But give Harris her due for getting where she is. After 20 years in politics, she stands within hailing distance of the White House and making further history from a geographic standpoint.

In politics, as so often in life, timing is everything.