The Sycophants Draw a Line

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

 

Donald J. Trump, the retired game show host and quondam pornographer who serves, incredibly enough, as the current president of these United States of America, is from time to time ungracious on social media. This somehow has come to the attention of Republicans.

 

Trump went onto social media to mock the late Rob Reiner and his wife, both of whom had just been brutally stabbed to death by (if investigators are correct) their own son and insisted that the patricide-matricide in question was the result of the fact that Reiner, a television and film producer with the familiar kind of Hollywood politics, was a bitter critic of the incumbent president. It is not easy to embarrass Republicans, who have spent the past decade polishing Trump’s jackboots with their tongues, but Trump found a way. A few “harrumphs” were heard rising from certain Republican quarters.

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Facebook troll and QAnon conspiracy kook who lately has decided that Trump is not quite dumb or irresponsible enough for her brand of politics, gently criticized the president, insisting that the bloody stabbing murder of two parents by their son was “a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.” Rep. Mike Lawler of New York responded in similarly lily-livered terms: “This statement is wrong,” he said. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.” He couldn’t quite manage to bring himself to use Trump’s name in his criticism of Trump—these people write about Trump’s statements as though they were self-authoring, ex nihilo—but, you know, baby steps.

 

Sen. Ted Cruz, a man so supine that sea slugs dwelling in the lightless depths of the deep ocean wonder why he can’t stand up for himself, addressed the murders without mentioning Trump, a man he serves as eagerly as any Renfield or Igor, in spite of the fact that the president called his wife, Heidi, ugly and suggested that his father, Rafael, was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among less personal offenses.

 

Marco Rubio, whose State Department went as far as to revoke people’s visas if they were insufficiently respectful after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, is so quiet about Trump’s jeering that you’d think he was in mourning for one of his literal sugar daddies. Cancel-culture enthusiast J.D. Vance, who encouraged his daft little minions to call the employers of random nobodies on social media and try to get them fired for unsympathetic remarks about Kirk, is doing a very good impersonation of the South Park version of himself.

 

Goodness, yes. Donald Trump is, from time to time, ungracious on social media. And a few Republicans—about three—have stood up on their hind legs to yap out a whimpering little response.

 

In January 2021, Donald Trump, who still controlled the vast resources of the executive branch of the federal government and who had just lost an election to a pretty good approximation of Mr. Potato Head, attempted to stage a coup d’état by means of election nullification in order to illegally and unconstitutionally hold on to power. He instigated a riot at the Capitol and attempted to suborn election fraud from state officials. In its combination of street violence with legal pretext, Trump’s coup attempt was pretty standard stuff, familiar to any Third World potentate or South American caudillo. Republicans from Ted Cruz to J.D. Vance to National Review editors to Moscow Madge and the rest of the knee-walking sycophants of the right figured out a way to get good with that attempt to overturn the American constitutional order and install himself illegitimately in the White House.

 

But Donald Trump is, from time to time, ungracious on social media.

 

Trump recently described a group consisting mostly of American citizens—black immigrants and their families—as “garbage” and added the familiar insistence that they should “go back to where they came from.” J.D. Vance banged on the table in encouragement and barked like a performing seal. Vance is, of course, in the habit of defaming black immigrants—it is kind of his thing. But other Republicans had nothing to say. Just Trump being Trump, and, well, these new Americans are the products of “shit holes,” after all. Republicans can live with that.

 

But Donald Trump is, from time to time, ungracious on social media.

 

Republicans who accepted, justified, and celebrated outrage after outrage after outrage from Donald Trump for a decade—from “grab ’em” to endless constant lies to gross corruption to illegal deportations to mass murder in the Caribbean to the attempted coup of 2021 and much more—have decided to draw the line at mocking the murder of the Reiners? That doesn’t mean that Republicans have rediscovered decency or their spines—it only means that Trump is starting to quack like a lame duck.

 

But a decade of enabling Donald Trump’s unresting blitz of indecency is not something that is going to be forgotten—or should be forgotten—come Election Day 2028. This is the kind of mark that does not get erased, a scar that takes more than time to fade.