In a half-sane world, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services would be recognized for what it plainly is — crazy. With this final nail in the coffin of better Kennedys, I think we can declare the family mystique finis.

A starstruck Donald Trump, meanwhile, must be having the time of his life, mocking and undermining nearly every American government institution by playing Cabinet roulette.

One can also safely infer that when Kennedy’s own family issues a statement denouncing his political shift, we should pay attention. No, I don’t think the Democratic Kennedys turned their backs on the serial adulterer, conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist only because he hitched his wagon to Trump. More likely, they fear that Trump could empower Kennedy to put into practice some of his loonier ideas.

Much of this Kennedy’s history is familiar. He’s a drug addict, possessed of “lust demons” (in his own words) and a journalist ... of a sort. He kept a diary of his sexual exploits with names and ratings from 1 to 10. Kennedy was an adult in his second marriage when he started scoring his exploits. (As far as we know.) In the journal, which somehow found its way to the New York Post, he claims to have had affairs with 37 women while married to his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy. She reportedly became aware of the journal at some point and, in the midst of the divorce, died by suicide.

In just the past year, Kennedy carried on a nine-month sexting relationship with a well-known journalist who was at the time engaged to another journalist. But Kennedy gets a pass because he’s — I give up. The guy has the face of a baseball mitt and yet women are tripping over each other trying to be his best girl. Three more women came forward in October claiming romantic involvement with Kennedy, whom they knew through the Children’s Health Defense, an advocacy group he founded to fight, among other things, 5G wireless technology. Kennedy claims that the technology causes cancer, infertility and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, for which there is, indeed, some limited, inconsistent evidence. He also claims that chemicals in our drinking water are making children gay or transgender, a conspiracy theory advanced by none other than Alex Jones.

What must life be like in the brain of this man? No wonder the worm died.

Our senators shouldn’t let any of this history bother them when weighing the relative merits of Kennedy to head a department with a budget greater than the budgets of every other country in the world except China. Maybe no one cares about Kennedy’s obvious judgment deficit, not to mention those demons. Besides, he’s probably good with numbers, given the large ones that accumulate in his bank accounts, thanks to his popularity with donors who have nothing better to do with their wealth. There’s lucre in the dissemination of disinformation and fear.

Like Trump, Kennedy seems impervious to consequences and shameless in the service of self-preservation. During his divorce from his second wife, he claimed during testimony that a brain worm had left him cognitively deficient, thus crippling his ability to earn money and therefore pay alimony. It’s rarely I get to use the word bodacious, but there’s a tale that deserves it.

In any case, Kennedy’s wormy squatter seems not to have dampened his ambitions to take down the pharmaceutical companies that create vaccines, more than a dozen of which have been mentioned in legal actions taken by Kennedy’s lawyer, the legendary vaccine litigator Aaron Siri. Two years ago, Siri petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that causes paralysis or death.

In 2015, Kennedy compared vaccines to the Holocaust.

Kind of makes you yearn for Ralph Nader, doesn’t it?

Dozens of peer-reviewed studies have debunked the autism claim, yet Kennedy and his cultish minions continue to repeat them. Siri also filed a petition seeking to pause distribution of 13 other vaccines. Kennedy, meanwhile, has promised to represent Trump’s directions rather than his own. What a relief. Apparently, Trump believes in vaccines, including the one he fast-tracked to slow the spread and lethality of COVID-19.

It must be said that Kennedy has his eye on some targets that are overdue for governmental scrutiny. Factory farming is an abomination. Environmental toxins can never be adequately controlled to my satisfaction. People have reason to question the contents of heavily processed foods. But lawyers and activists who cherry-pick data and traffic in junk science shouldn’t be assigned greater credibility than scientists who subject their research to strict quality standards.

Kennedy’s willingness to bend the truth to his purposes should not be rewarded with one of the nation’s most important jobs. His confirmation would be not just bad for the national health. It would also be crazy.