Marion McKeone: Youngest Kennedy is not a knight on a white horse for Democrats

Jack Schlossberg, 32, has the JFK direct lineage, the Kennedy looks, the charisma, the dazzling smile, the confidence, and the smarts — but if he has a political platform, he hasn’t shared it, writes Marion McKeone.

Jack Schlossberg, left, with Caroline Kennedy, former US vice president Mike Pence, and Karen Pence as Mr Pence received this year’s 2025 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. Picture: Getty

There remains a persistent belief in some sectors of the United States, against all evidence to the contrary, that the Kennedy clan will come riding to the rescue and save both the Democratic Party and American democracy from itself. That a new dawn of Camelot will usher in a golden age of American prosperity, power, and equality. That Trump’s dystopian world view and authoritarian creep will be replaced with a democratic Utopian ideal where diversity, equality, and inclusion are celebrated and American innovation will lead to prosperity for all and a return of the American Dream.

Somewhat surprisingly, the fringes that cling to this illusion transcend America’s fierce partisanship. The Maga crowd embraced Robert F Kennedy Jr so completely that Trump became concerned his popularity and profile would eclipse his own. And four years ago, Dallas police estimated that up to 2,000 QAnon conspiracists gathered at the site where John F Kennedy was assassinated 58 years earlier, convinced that his son John F Kennedy Jr would appear alive and well and wearing a Maga hat.