Jack Schlossberg, the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy, was not among the many people poring over the new trove of government files about Kennedy’s assassination when it was released Tuesday. Instead, Schlossberg was on social media criticizing President Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers and the news media over the handling of the files.
Schlossberg, 32, the son of Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, and an outspoken voice in Democratic politics, has long been a critic of the Trump administration and its policies. During last year’s election cycle, he made a series of comedic TikTok posts that mocked Republican candidates, as well as his cousin Robert Kennedy Jr., who was then running for president as an independent. But the unsealing of 64,000 pages of files about his grandfather’s assassination, under an executive order from Trump, made the political personal.
In a series of posts on X that were fiery even by Schlossberg’s standards, he said that the Trump administration did not give anyone in Kennedy’s family a “heads up” before the documents were released. “A total surprise, and not shocker!!” he wrote.
The Trump administration did not immediately reply to a request for comment about Schlossberg’s assertion that the Kennedys had not been advised on the release ahead of time.
Beyond his own online thread about the files, Schlossberg also took issue with a post on X from Mike Lee, the senior senator from Utah and a Republican, who asked the question, “Why did it take so long to release the JFK files?” Schlossberg responded, “You really care about JFK’s legacy? You’re dismantling it.”
Schlossberg, who was hired in July as political correspondent for Vogue, was also critical of the news media’s extensive coverage of the decades-old documents. Standing in front of a wall-mounted TV tuned to CNN, in which political correspondent Harry Enten and anchor Erin Burnett were discussing the JFK files as breaking news, Schlossberg said in a video post, “There’s so much actual news. Why are you covering this? … Stop.”
Schlossberg saved his harshest criticism for Trump. He said that Trump has an “obsession” with his grandfather’s death but not his life or his policies. For instance, Schlossberg noted that the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the agency the Trump administration has recently dismantled through job cuts and the freezing of foreign aid, was created by President John F. Kennedy, in 1961.
Reached Wednesday, Schlossberg declined to comment beyond what he had said on social media.
The American public has long had a fascination with the Kennedy assassination. In 1992, after the Oliver Stone film “JFK” led to a surge of interest (and conspiracy theories), Congress passed a law directing the National Archives and Records Administration to gather in one place all known U.S. government records relating to the Kennedy assassination. The law required all documents to be released within 25 years. About 99% of the known Kennedy papers have since been publicly disclosed, according to the National Archives.
For Schlossberg, the assassination of his grandfather is both a national tragedy and an ongoing distraction.
“For decades, conspiracies surrounding his death have shifted focus away from the important lessons of his life and the critical issues of the moment,” Schlossberg once wrote. “They continue to do so today.”
Schlossberg didn’t write those words on X this week, but in Time magazine — in 2017.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
