No sooner had John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter died of leukemia at age 35, than President Donald Trump got busy dusting off previous social media posts to cast shade at her bereaved family.
Though he didn’t mention the late Tatiana Schlossberg by name or reference her death, Trump harvested screenshots of his supporters’ posts belittling the famous family after his newly handpicked board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to tack the president’s name onto the venue.
The Kennedy family announced Schlossberg’s death on Tuesday from a rare form of leukemia with the simple message, “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts.”
Schlossberg had written poignantly about her diagnosis and treatment in The New Yorker in November, a powerful account of a year-long journey that paralleled her cousin Robert Kennedy Jr.’s attack on the nation’s public health system as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
As condolences poured in, Trump, reportedly miffed at the raft of performance cancellations in the wake of the board’s Dec. 18 name change, pulled supporters’ social media posts out of mothballs and onto Truth Social. He re-upped such gems as, “The Kennedy Family have LONG neglected the Kennedy Center, btw. 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,” and, “The Trumps have always been supporters of the arts. The Kennedys are supporters of the Kennedys.”
The Kennedys themselves were especially vocal during the public backlash against the institution’s name change, given that Congress had dedicated it as a living memorial to JFK after the president’s 1963 assassination.
CNN’s Jake Tapper and others led the excoriation charge against Trump’s posts.
“In the early afternoon, ET, the Kennedy family announced that JFK’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg had died from cancer,” the anchor wrote on X. “A few hours later, President Trump re-posted some social media garbage attacking the Kennedy family.”
Barely a month earlier, Trump had blamed movie director Rob Reiner for his own murder.
“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,” Meidas Touch wrote on X. “Yet another stunning display of cruelty and utter lack of basic human decency.”