Trump’s Appalling Reiner Reaction Is a Sign of Something Deeply Wrong

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

 

Yes, we must talk about what President Trump posted on Truth Social about the brutal murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner, and how Trump doubled down when asked about it Monday afternoon. We must talk about it because a lot of Americans are embarrassed by the president, and for the president, and a whole lot of Americans would prefer to avert their eyes and pretend it didn’t happen. But it did happen. We must talk about it because there are some Americans still so blinded by partisan animus and cult-like loyalty that their first instinct will be to defend the president’s remarks. We will never become a better or more united country if we cannot point to indecent actions taken and statements made by those we agree with politically and say, “This is wrong. This is something that decent human beings do not do. You must do better than this.”

 

Earlier this year, we went through a terrible trauma of watching Charlie Kirk get murdered right before our eyes, if you were unlucky enough to encounter the unedited video. And then we got the second wave of horror watching lots of ordinary progressive Americans celebrate his death or attempt to justify his murder — small acts of utterly unjustifiable and unnecessary cruelty. If you are bothered by the social media postings of random unknown Americans but are willing to bend over backwards to excuse or justify the comments from the president, then you are a hypocrite of the highest order.

 

Donald Trump, Stark Raving Maniac

 

The president of the United States is a hateful raging lunatic with all the empathy of Jeffrey Dahmer.

 

Legendary Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead at their Brentwood home Sunday. Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said that officers responded to the Reiner home about 3:40 p.m. The couple’s son, Nick Reiner, 32, was found in South Los Angeles near USC, about 15 miles from the scene of the stabbing, and arrested around 9:15 p.m., according to the Los Angeles Times, citing a law enforcement source who was not authorized to speak publicly.

 

The L.A. Times reported that “the Reiners had injuries consistent with being stabbed” and that a family friend had said that Nick Reiner, who had struggled with addiction for years, was living in a guesthouse on his parents’ property, and his mother had become increasingly concerned about his mental health in recent weeks.

 

It’s just about the saddest thing imaginable.

 

And here’s how the president responded Monday morning, in a Truth Social post:

 

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

 

Now, the president of the United States does not need to weigh in on every murder in the country, even the shocking double murder involving a celebrity. The president had the option of writing nothing, and raging about Reiner’s alleged past transgressions privately. He also had the option of issuing some brief but appropriate statement — “Despite our past disagreements, I am shocked to hear of the terrible deaths of the Reiners. I offer my condolences to their friends and family,” etcetera.

 

Instead, the man who currently has access to the nuclear button chose to characterize Reiner as unsuccessful and attributed his being stabbed to death to his criticism of Trump. The president suggested that Rob Reiner had driven his own son and murderer “CRAZY” — and in some ways, implied that the Reiners had gotten what they deserved.

 

And then, yesterday, at the White House, when asked about his appalling reaction, the president chose to double down on it:

 

Q: Mr. President, a number of Republicans have denounced your statement on Truth Social after the murder of Rob Reiner. Do you stand by that post?

 

Trump: Well, I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned. He said he liked, he knew it was false. In fact, it’s the exact opposite that I was, uh, a friend of Russia controlled by Russia. You know it was the Russia hoax, he was one of the people behind it. I think he hurt himself in career wise. He became like a deranged person, Trump derangement syndrome. So, I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any way, shape or form. I thought he was very bad for our country.

 

Mm-hmm. You know, Rob Reiner did just get stabbed to death, alongside his wife, by his own son. Most ordinary human beings could put aside their past differences for a half minute to express some sadness at his bloody murder. The president is incapable of doing that.

 

I’ll let you decide whether the term psychopath or sociopath better describes the president’s actions. On some level, we always knew the president was a nut of some kind, obsessed with grievances; vindictive and prone to posting late-night tirades on social media; uninterested in details; erratic, impulsive, spiteful. (“But he fights!”) You can run a company that enjoyed a wildly lucrative role conducting financial transactions among criminals, terrorist groups, and hostile states, and this president will pardon you, believing anything he’s told about how Joe Biden prosecuted him because he hated crypto. Or you can run a massive cocaine smuggling operation while being president of a South American country, and this president will pardon you, too, because he’ll believe anything he’s told about how your successful prosecution was a witch hunt.

 

This president cannot discern moral right and wrong through a person’s actions, like a normal human being. Donald Trump’s entire worldview of whether someone is a good person or a bad person depends entirely on whether that person offers praise or criticism of Trump. This is the person who runs the executive branch of the U.S. government, and this is a formula for disaster. This is, I suspect, a factor in why the Trump administration is so friendly to the likes of Xi Jinping and endlessly patient with Vladimir Putin, while sneering with contempt about leaders of European democracies. Trump does not see anything inherently morally objectionable about a brutal autocrat with a long history of egregious human-rights abuses, but he will never forget or forgive a European leader who ever uttered a critical word in Le Monde.

 

You can prefer the president’s policies. You can say you’re happy you voted for him over Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris.

 

But what you can’t say is that Donald Trump is a good and decent human being. You can claim we’ve always known this, but there are Americans out there who have managed to convince themselves otherwise, just as there are Americans who have convinced themselves that Trump is a “good Christian.”

 

Let us also point out that the president is 79 years, six months, and three days old today. That’s how old Joe Biden was in May 2022. The White House and a lot of Trump fans did not like the New York Times article in late November that noted Trump “keeps a shorter public schedule than he used to. Most of his public appearances fall between noon and 5 p.m., on average. And when he is in public, occasionally, his battery shows signs of wear.”

 

Yes, Trump appears before reporters and answers questions way more frequently than Joe Biden did, and that is an unalloyed good thing. Yes, he has way more energy than Biden did at that age, but let’s face it, that’s not exactly the highest bar to clear.

 

But elderly men sometimes get crankier and angrier and more prone to outbursts. Trump’s fanbase would like to believe that he’s immune to the effects of age, and that in the years to come, he’s going to be what Biden never could be: an effective octogenarian president.

 

Some people out there are going to argue that what the president says about a slain Hollywood director is not worth criticism, and it certainly isn’t worth a whole newsletter’s coverage. But of all the things a president must do in a day, a week, a month, a year, this is one of the easiest tasks: temporarily put your sense of grievance and rage aside and make appropriate remarks and demonstrate basic human empathy.

 

The guy who can’t feel empathy for the Reiners being stabbed to death by their son is also not going to feel empathy for the people who contend the cost of living is still high, which is why the president keeps running around insisting the word “affordability” is a Democratic hoax and that Americans are living in a “golden age.” This is why his approval rating on the economy hit 31 percent. There are far-reaching consequences of having a president who is emotionally broken.

 

Finally, this is another edition of the newsletter where a decent number of people will be much angrier at me for noticing what the president said and did than they will be at the president for what he said and did.

 

ADDENDUM: As of this writing, the perpetrator of the mass shooting at Brown University Saturday afternoon has not yet been caught. We’ve grown painfully used to mass shootings in this country, but we have not grown used to the perpetrators escaping without a trace, never encountering any cop, campus security guard, or an armed citizen.

 

Over at that other Washington publication, I ask how an Ivy League college campus can have more than 800 security cameras and yet somehow not have any good footage of the shooter:

 

The failure of the university’s system of surveillance cameras to generate more useful leads is a frustrating and infuriating wrinkle in an already frightening situation. And it raises the question: If a network of security cameras can’t offer much help in a situation like this — why do we have them in place?

 

The commenters over there, so far, largely believe this is a matter of Rhode Island not having enough gun control laws.

 

The FBI has released more photos of the perpetrator, but . . . those are not particularly illuminating images.