The Washington Post reports:

As he suspended his independent presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump on Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked at length about the “many key issues” on which he claims that he and Trump are aligned. What he did not explain were their profound disagreements in the area that for many years was central to Kennedy’s career and public image: environmental protection.

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.

His decision has left many of Kennedy’s former allies on environmental causes in shock, even those who had already broken with him over his anti-vaccine views or quixotic presidential bid. Some said the move undid any legacy Kennedy — named one of Time magazine’s “heroes of the planet” in 1999 — could still claim to have in the nation’s environmental movement.

“It’s sad and surreal,” said Michael Brune, a former executive director of the Sierra Club who was arrested alongside Kennedy at the White House in 2013 for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. “It’s a betrayal of his values and the work that he’s done for most of his career. He’s supporting someone who’s been the most aggressive in terms of trying to undermine our bedrock environmental laws.”

Unlike Republicans who have criticized Trump only to later bend the knee to him, Brune said, Kennedy is — or at least was — separated from him by seemingly insurmountable policy differences.

“In terms of policy issues that people hold dear, I can’t think of another example where a prominent political figure with such a strong record on one issue can go so dramatically and rapidly in the other direction,” Brune said. [Continue reading…]