President Donald Trump shared several screenshots mocking the Kennedy family just hours after the death of Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of late President John F. Kennedy.
Trump, 79, posted various screenshots of social media posts via Truth Social on Tuesday, December 30, defending the renaming of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to The Trump Kennedy Center. Some of the posts chastised the famous Kennedy family.
One post read: “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.”
“The Trumps have always been supporters of the arts. The Kennedys are supporters of the Kennedys,” another social media post read.
Just hours earlier, the Kennedy family announced the death of Tatiana, who died aged 35 on Tuesday after being diagnosed with terminal acute myeloid leukemia, a form of cancer, following the birth of her second child in May 2024.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the JFK Library Foundation shared in a statement posted to Instagram on Tuesday. The post was signed by Tatiana’s husband, George Moran, their two children, Edwin, 3, and Josephine, 19 months, parents Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline, siblings Jack and Rose Schlossberg, and her sister-in-law, Rory McAuliffe.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” Tatiana wrote in a New Yorker essay announcing her cancer diagnosis last month. “My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter — I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”
In D.C., meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an X post on December 18 that the Kennedy Center board of trustees — entirely appointed by Trump — had voted “unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.”
The move received criticism from members of the Kennedy family, including Maria Shriver, JFK’s niece.
“The Kennedy Center was named after my uncle, President John F. Kennedy. It was named in his honor. He was a man who was interested in the arts, interested in culture, interested in education, language, history,” she wrote in an Instagram post on December 18. “He brought the arts into the White House, and he and my Aunt Jackie [Kennedy Onassis] amplified the arts, celebrated the arts, stood up for the arts and artists.”
Shriver added, “It is beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy. It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not.”
