President Donald Trump is drawing renewed criticism after responding to the death of Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of the 35th president, John F Kennedy, on Tuesday by reposting criticism of the Kennedy family on Truth Social.
Schlossberg, 35, was an environmental journalist who wrote for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. She passed away after being diagnosed with a rare type of acute myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer.
Her death was announced by the JFK Library Foundation yesterday, which said in a statement: “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts.”
Schlossberg is survived by her husband, George Moran; their three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter; her parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg; her brother, Jack Schlossberg, an aspiring congressman; and her sister, Rose Schlossberg.
But rather than pay tribute to the deceased or express condolences to her grieving family, the president fired out three posts consisting of screenshots of negative comments about the Kennedys’ supposed neglect of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the performing arts venue Trump has taken over this year and rebranded the “Trump Kennedy Center.”
“The Kennedy Family have LONG neglected the Kennedy Center, btw,” read one post included from Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam. “They don’t raise money for it. They never show up. And the only Kennedy who has been there recently is a member of Trump’s cabinet.”
Among the other congratulatory posts about the president’s takeover of the venue, which has seen ticket sales plummet and artists boycott its stage, were messages from allies like Special Presidential Envoy Richard Grenell, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sergio Gor, U.S. Ambassador to India, and Erika Donalds, wife of Florida GOP Rep. Byron Donalds.
Kassam was referring to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, Schlossberg’s uncle, in his comment.
There did not appear to be any love lost between the secretary and his late niece, who criticised him in a New Yorker essay about her illness published last month.
“I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government,” she wrote of him, going on to decry the cuts he has overseen to medical research funding, particularly for “mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers.”
The president has never been afraid to make light of the Kennedys’ storied legacy, famously pushing a conspiracy theory in 2016 alleging that Rafael Cruz, the father of his erstwhile rival turned ally, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, was involved in the assassination of JFK in Dallas in November 1963.
Trump’s unsparing reaction to Schlossberg’s passing might also call to mind his widely-condemned post about the murder of Hollywood movie director Rob Reiner earlier this month, whom Trump said had been killed “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
Among those objecting to the president’s latest posts was the anti-Trump media organization MeidasTouch, which wrote on X: “On a day when the Kennedy family is grappling with an unimaginable personal loss, Donald Trump chose to use his platform to launch petty, vindictive attacks against them. Yet another stunning display of cruelty and utter lack of basic human decency.”
CNN anchor Jake Tapper similarly derided Trump’s posts as “social media garbage.”
