When LBJ would occasionally let bygones be bygones and welcome an old political foe into the fold, his loyalists would ask him what the hell he was thinking of.

LBJ would always shrug and say this about his erstwhile rival:

“I’d rather have him inside the tent, bleeping out, than outside the tent, bleeping in.”

Maybe there’s some of that with President Trump welcoming RFK Jr. to his campaign Friday night, but I think there’s more to it than that.

If you read Bobby’s speech, delivered before he joined up with Trump in Glendale, it appears that Bobby fancies himself as a victim of the same Deep State oppression that Trump has endured since 2015.

It was a damn good speech, which you can tell by how quickly five of his siblings attacked him for it. But among those Kennedys not signing off on the ritual denunciation were his brothers Joe and Max. Those two may not be on board with Bobby’s epiphany, but they must understand what he’s had to endure.

Bobby’s attack on the Democrat party was particularly brutal, and on target.

“In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic party set about dismantling it. … The DNC waged continued legal warfare against both President Trump and myself… It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail.”

You’re not supposed to say “DNC-aligned judges,” but that’s exactly what they are.

He also mentioned how his campaign was frozen out of state-run media. In 1992, in his 10-month campaign as an independent, Ross Perot had 34 interviews with ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC.

In 16 months, Bobby got two. In Democrat media, the sins of omission are often worse than the sins of commission.

He mentioned how many of the assembled reporters he’d spoken to. He even did an interview with me, down in Boca Raton, last April. He’d just turned in a huge number of signatures in Nevada to get a spot on the November ballot, but suddenly… the rules had been changed.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

One of his biggest issues was the Deep State’s catastrophic overreaction to COVID. On my show, Kennedy pointed out how everyone had fallen into lockstep, even President Trump. I said that it seemed clear, even at the time, that Trump at least had suspicions that there was no there there.

“Yeah, but that’s just the point,” Kennedy said. “He intuitively knew it was a scam, and he still allowed himself to get rolled. You can’t allow that to happen.”

Trump recalled Friday night how Kennedy had come at him hard on occasion, but he can shrug it off. Paris is worth a Mass, to quote Henry IV. On the evening of the assassination attempt last month, the two men spoke.

They had a lot to talk about. Bobby, you may recall, had been turned down by Biden for Secret Service protection because… Democrats.

How good a speech did Bobby deliver? CNN cut out of it, in short order. It wasn’t advancing the Ministry of Truth’s narrative, so the apparatchiks had to step in and cancel it. You know, misinformation…

First in his speech, and later in his remarks at Trump’s huge rally in Glendale, Kennedy touched on any number of issues, including childhood health and the neocons’ war in Ukraine. But for me, the most important issue he raised was the modern Democrats’ rabid antipathy to free speech.

“They don’t fear lies, they fear the truth, and that’s what they censor.”

In Glendale, near the end, Kennedy said:

“Can you think of any time that we can look back on in history and say that the people that were censoring were the good guys? They’re always the bad guys because it’s always the first step down that slippery slope to totalitarianism.”

No, there’s no room in the modern Democrat party for RFK Jr. He hasn’t lived the best of lives — check out my book, “Kennedy Babylon Vol. 2.” But he’s on to something here. And even his father and his uncle, no moral exemplars themselves, would have no role in this Democrat party.

JFK famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

JFK was in effect exhorting Americans to… work. Among Democrats of 2024, that’s practically hate speech.

JFK also spoke of the “long twilight struggle” — against totalitarianism. Now the only long struggle the Democrats are behind is the not-so-twilight struggle against the Constitution.

“Don’t you want,” Kennedy said as Trump stood beside him, “a president who is going to protect America’s freedom and who is going to protect us against totalitarianism?”

Totalitarianism both at home and abroad, he might have added. But after the last few years, I guess it’s obvious.

I doubt JFK could even get 15 percent of the delegates’ vote at a Massachusetts Democrat state convention to get himself on the primary ballot. And he certainly couldn’t win a statewide primary. Even his great-nephew, JoJoJo Kennedy, couldn’t defeat an idiot hack in 2020, and he was in the comrades’ amen chorus.

Will Bobby’s endorsement make a difference? I don’t know, but to go back to LBJ, it’s better to have him inside the tent…

One final point of Kennedy family history: Today the late Sen. Ted Kennedy is finally eligible for his 15-year sobriety coin from Alcoholics Anonymous.

Teddy died 15 years ago today —Aug. 25, 2009.

Pre-order Howie’s new book, “You Understand American?” at Howiecarrshow.com.