The shocking hate rally hosted by Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden fully vindicated every parallel drawn to the pro-Nazi rally held at the old Garden in February 1939. The racist rhetoric, the ugly threats, the parody of Americanism and Christianity, all echoed that historic tableau of traitors pretending to be patriots. At long last, we got a chance to see Trump’s purloined “America First” slogan in its proper frame – as the watchword that Hitler’s agents in this country used to launder their isolationist movement against Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Up there on the dais stood Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., making ridiculous promises on behalf of Trump, with whom he has consummated a corrupt political bargain. Then he asked in his trademark rasp, “Don’t you want a president who’s gonna put America first?”

What Kennedy meant when he repeated the old slogan was not immediately clear, but the context was perfectly plain. Bobby is a grandson of Joseph P. Kennedy, the defeatist, isolationist, and antisemitic ambassador to the United Kingdom who undermined America’s will to resist Hitler in the 1930s, declaring that democracy was dead in England and soon would be dead here as well. When Joe Kennedy resigned as ambassador, the America First movement -- always in close communication with Hitler’s spies in the United States -- immediately invited him to head their organization.

After the war John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and the rest of their family spent decades trying to rectify this tainted legacy. And now comes Bobby Jr. to revive the worst of those memories at the Garden, while promoting a revisionist version of his uncle’s presidency that justifies his own acquiescence to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

The disgraced nephew would erase JFK’s unforgettable vow in his 1961 inaugural address: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Like Trump, Bobby would abandon our friends and placate our enemies, with no concern whatsoever for the survival and success of liberty.

He has made a defining choice by aligning himself with fascism and the enemies of this republic. His honorable family, whose members have done so much to serve their country, has rejected that treachery and shunned Bobby’s perfidious campaign.

Much more than the Kennedy reputation is at stake, and they know it.