Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s stunning declaration that his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle, President Kennedy, would not “have a place in today’s Democratic Party” underscores the widening schism in America’s most famous political family. 

The reflections on the legacy of the Kennedys came during a conversation at Philadelphia between the erstwhile presidential candidate and the publisher of the Sun, Dovid Efune. Mr. Kennedy mounted an independent bid for the White House but now backs President Trump.

Mr. Kennedy asserts that “All the policies that my uncle and father believed [in], and I believe I would check every one of those boxes, and Donald Trump today is much closer to that, and he doesn’t agree with me on everything.” Mr. Kennedy, who is serving on Trump’s transition team, also shared that the Democratic Party “no longer represents the kind of things that I checked with.”

The Kennedy scion described a “complete inversion” of America’s two political parties that leaves the 45th president’s worldview closer to that of his father and uncle. Mr. Kennedy lamented that Democrats “were always the anti-war party, we were the party of civil rights and constitutional rights, including freedom of speech… today we’re the party of censorship and surveillance.” Mr. Kennedy avers that the “Democratic Party that I grew up with was the party of peace.”

Mr. Kennedy also lambasts the party of Secretary Clinton and Vice President Harris for being “against women’s sports and all of these different issues.” He observes that his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, was a supporter of Title IX, the law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding. The Biden administration has proposed changes to Title IX that Mr. Kennedy worries will undermine those protections.   

Mr. Kennedy’s remarks could be construed as, among other things, a rare vindication by a Kennedy of the book “JFK, Conservative,” by The New York Sun’s founding managing editor, Ira Stoll, who is now a columnist for the paper and issues at Substack a publication called The Editors. And of Lawrence Kudlow’s book “JFK and the Reagan Revolution, A Secret History of American Prosperity.”

Mr. Stoll’s book, brought out in 2013 by Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt contrasted President Kennedy with today’s Democrats. The 35th president, he argues, was a hardline anti-communist, made supply-side tax  cuts on top incomes a centerpiece of his economic policy, and was a pro-life Catholic. Mr. Kudlow’s book focuses on fiscal policy.

Mr. Kennedy’s avowed departure from the political commitments of his family — he insists that it is his relatives who misunderstand the legacy — could add further ballast to the Stoll-Kudlow reading of history.