Donald Trump’s Remarks on the Death of Rob Reiner Are Next-Level Degradation

Have you ever encountered such an unfortunate character in your life as Donald Trump? For many, this question was asked and definitively answered twenty years ago, when Trump was still a vulgar realtor touting his brand on Howard Stern's radio show and agreeing with the host's assessment that his daughter Ivanka was an “ass” and describing how he “got away with” going backstage at the Miss Universe pageant to see the contestants naked.

Or perhaps his character became clearer ten years later, during his first presidential run, when he spoke of John McCainwho spent more than five years under torture in a North Vietnamese prison: “He's not a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured.” It was a letter from a man who had avoided war thanks to four student deferments and a medical deferment due to bone spurs in his heel. Larry Brownstein, the orthopedic surgeon from Jamaica, Queens, who gave Trump this timely diagnosis, rented his office in the fall of 1968 from Fred Trump, Donald's father. One of the late doctor's daughters told Time, “I know it was a favor.”

One day, a historian will win a contract to collect quotes from the forty-fifth and forty-seventh presidents—all the rants in the press, the attacks in the Oval Office, AM True Social Dream Fever. The first chapters will include: “Blood Flows Out of Her – Anywhere.” “Horse face” “Fat pig.” “Suckers.” “Losers.” “Enemies of the people.” “Pocahontas.” And then the volume will go to “Pig.” “Things happen.” And so on.

After a decade of constant presence on the political stage, Trump no longer seems capable of shocking anyone with the cruelty of his language or the recklessness of his behavior. His supporters continue to justify his careless cruelty by saying that “Trump is Trump,” which is proof of his authenticity. (Anti-Semitism Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlsonand a group of young Republican leaders conversing in a group are similarly included in the “big tent” MAGA rhetoric.) Now, when a friend starts a conversation with “Did you hear what Trump said today?”, you try your best to avoid the topic. What's the point? And yet this week the president truly appears to have broken through to a new level of degradation.

Last weekend brought a terrible and rapid series of violent events. Saturday afternoon in Providence unidentified gunman on Brown University campus shot and killed two students and wounded nine others during an exam. The killer has not yet been found. On Sunday at Archer Park, near Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, a group of father and son dressed in black and heavily armed reportedly targeted a crowd of Jewish men, women and children celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. At least fifteen people were killed, including an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor and a ten-year-old girl. The massacre was the latest in a long line of anti-Semitic incidents in Australia and beyond.

Finally, on Sunday evening, news came that the actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner were found dead in their home. Their bodies were discovered by their daughter Romy. Los Angeles police arrested their son, thirty-two-year-old Nick Reiner. According to press reports, the investigation immediately focused on him, not only because of his drug abuse, but also because he had behaved erratically the night before in the presence of his parents at a holiday party at Conan O'Brien's house. Nick Reiner is being held without bond in the Los Angeles County Jail.

There was something about these three events that happened in such quick succession that was heartbreaking: again regular mass shootings in America, this time in Providence; the intense hatred of Jews behind the massacres in Australia; the sheer sadness of losing such a beloved and worthy figure of popular culture and his wife, presumably at the hands of their troubled son. It would be naive to think that any leader, any clergy can alleviate all this pain with a gesture or speech. Barack Obama speak and sing “Amazing Grace” from the pulpit in Charleston, South Carolina, or Robert F. Kennedy speaking in Indianapolis on the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated—this kind of moral eloquence is somehow beyond our modern understandings and expectations. What you don't expect is for the President of the United States to make the situation even worse than it already was. But of course he did it. “A very sad thing happened in Hollywood last night,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social. He continued: