The world is on fire, as it is too often these days.
But the horrors of the past week — coming in such rapid-fire succession — have overwhelmed us. Jews massacred while celebrating Hanukkah on Australia’s iconic Bondi Beach. The gunmen were father-and-son adherents of the Islamic State.
Students massacred at Brown University, where my daughter went to college. Brown is known as “Happy Ivy.” Or was. Several students affected by the violence had been affected by shootings in high school. Meanwhile, the gunman remains at large.
And as we were still shaken by our collective grief came the news of the brutal murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son, Nick. It was announced Tuesday that Nick Reiner, who has struggled with drug addiction and mental illness, will be charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
Reiner’s death was such a gut punch. He was someone we all knew, and someone many of us thought we knew personally. In his career as actor and director, he told the stories of our lives. That story couldn’t end with such graphic and tragic violence, and yet it did.
And just when it seemed as if matters couldn’t get any worse, they, of course, did. These are the times in which we live, the times that try men’s souls.
All it took was for Donald Trump to turn to social media to deliver a message that was not only remarkable, even for him, in its savagery, but to quote from conservative columnist Mona Charen, also “deranged, pathologically narcissistic, crude, stupid, and cruel.”
Want early access to
Mike’s columns?
Subscribe to get an
exclusive first look at
his columns twice a week.
She added: “No human adult outside a psych ward expresses such thoughts. To have them at all is evidence of a twisted soul.”
Jim Geraghty at the conservative National Review took matters a few steps further, stating the plain truth, for all to see, even for many whose eyes have been closed to Trump’s cruelty: “The president of the United States is a hateful raging lunatic with all the empathy of Jeffrey Dahmer.”
He’s a sociopath or a psychopath, maybe both, and a hateful, raging lunatic who has dominated our lives for a decade and twice has been elected president. And if you haven’t seen Trump’s Truth Social post on Reiner, please read it.
It much too awful to ignore, much too awful to pretend away, much, much too awful to excuse as Donnie just being Donnie:
“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!
We don’t come to Trump for consolation. We know better. We learned that much at the very beginning of MAGA time, when his opponent, John McCain, died and we watched Trump revel in the American hero’s death.
Adam Serwer’s first-term summation of Trump in the Atlantic — that cruelty is the point — has reached the point of cliché. But my god.
Reiner’s death is not just all about Trump, as he tells us. Everything, as we know from MAGA land, is always all about Trump.
But this: Reiner and his wife were killed because they suffered from “mind-crippling …TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” to the point that Reiner’s “raging obsession” had “driven people CRAZY,” making his murder not only inevitable but his own fault.
Yes, Trump blamed Reiner for his own murder. And his death, naturally, was Trump’s victory.
Just as he calls for the deaths of those, like Jason Crow, for treason in daring to oppose him. Just as he calls for the imprisonment of Letitia James, Adam Schiff and James Comey. And for the court-martial of Mark Kelly.
I assume this, finally, makes everyone angry. I have yet that much hope for our society, even though much of the MAGA base still defends Trump. But not only are Trump’s poll numbers cratering, some Republican leaders even rightly called Trump’s words repulsive.
Still others, like Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate President John Thune, called the deaths “tragic,” but said nothing at all about Trump’s response. Somehow, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who called out Trump for making Reiner’s death about politics, has become the conscience of her party. Is MAGA cracking or just Trump?
Trump’s words are all the more obscene — and hard for many Republicans to take — since his post on Reiner comes so soon after he had roundly berated those random posters who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death. He wanted Kirk’s critics fired or worse, even as he told us we should be better than that, as if we believed him.
He used Kirk’s death as a chance to pick at the wounds of our all-too-raw partisanship and create a martyr for Trumpism.
And now he has done something all too similar with Reiner, who was, of course, not just an actor and a legendary director but a full-throated activist in opposition to Trump and Trumpism. Trump’s call-for-retribution derangement was inevitable.
Now, you’d think, is a time for reflection, particularly in this holiday season. A time for soul-burning sadness. A time when we reach out to each other for comfort.
Instead, it’s a time when we are reminded, none too gently, that the old rules of common decency and comity are as much at risk as any other foundational American values.
The world is on fire, and Donald Trump, dependably, inarguably, pours gas on the flames.
To further quote Geraghty on Trump’s ravings: “Grief became a plaything. Shock became his permission.”
What Trump said is nowhere near the worst of his depravity. Children are dying of starvation in Africa because of Trump’s cruel budget cuts. Children are dying in Gaza because of Trump’s desperate need for a peace treaty he can call his own and the Nobel Prize that he desires so nakedly. People are going to lose their health insurance by the millions because Trump won’t continue Obamacare subsidies.
There’s more. There’s always more. Trump is responsible for sinking alleged drug-running Venezuelan boats at sea, killing all aboard, which is almost certainly against international law and even American law, even as he pardons a Latin American president responsible for sending 400 tons of cocaine to the United States.
I didn’t know Rob Reiner. But I did. Some of my friends and I spent at least a year talking only in “Spinal Tap”-speak. The drummer who died choking on vomit, not necessarily his own. In Nigel Tufnel’s words: “You can’t really dust for vomit.”
I know many of you can still, inconceivably, quote from “The Princess Bride” at length, and you have the you-can’t-handle-the-truth speech from “A Few Good Men” on auto repeat.
A friend of mine just wrote on Facebook how “Stand by Me” felt like a personal “gift” to him from Reiner, a gift that keeps on giving.
If you’re of a certain age, as I am, Reiner came to you first as Meathead to Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker in Norman Lear’s groundbreaking “All in the Family.” In my own life, I was the left-wing anti-war Meathead to my father-in-law’s right-wing, but better educated, Archie Bunker. For years, nearly every time we ate together ended with someone in the family in tears.
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
Just last night I watched Reiner’s brilliant documentary on Albert Brooks, his best friend and fellow comedy genius. Like so many great moviemakers or authors or songwriters, their work never loses its hold on me. I know many of you feel the same.
Trump could have just left us to our grief. He could have written some pabulum about how he and Reiner disagreed on much, but that this destruction of a family far transcends politics.
He could have said nothing. He could have played golf or found a new architect for his ballroom.
Instead, he made time in his day to mock Reiner in death. And, in mocking Reiner, he mocked us all. And still, so many millions can’t handle the truth.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
Follow Colorado Sun Opinion on Facebook.