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DONALD TRUMP’S REMARKS ON THE DEATH OF ROB REINER ARE NEXT-LEVEL
DEGRADATION
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David Remnick
December 16, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ On a weekend of terrible violent events, you would not expect a
President of the United States to make matters even worse. But, of
course, he did. _
, Samuel Corum / Sipa / Bloomberg / Getty
Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as
Donald Trump [[link removed]]? For many
people, this was a question asked and definitively answered twenty
years ago, when Trump was still a real-estate vulgarian shilling his
brand on Howard Stern’s radio show and agreeing with the host’s
assessment that his daughter Ivanka was “a piece of ass” and
describing how he could “get away with” going backstage at the
Miss Universe pageant to see the contestants naked.
Or, perhaps, his character came clear a decade later, during his first
run for the Presidency, when he said of John McCain
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who spent more than five years being tortured in a North Vietnamese
prison, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was
captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” This was from a
man who avoided the war with four student deferments and a medical
deferment for bone spurs in his heel. Larry Braunstein, a podiatrist
in Jamaica, Queens, who provided Trump with this timely diagnosis, in
the fall of 1968, rented his office from Fred Trump, Donald’s
father. One of the late doctor’s daughters told the _Times_
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“I know it was a favor.”
One day, a historian will win a contract to assemble the collected
quotations of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh President—all the
press-room rants, the Oval Office put-downs, the 3 _A.M._ Truth Social
fever dreams. The early chapters will include: “Blood coming out of
her—wherever.” “Horseface.” “Fat pig.” “Suckers.”
“Losers.” “Enemies of the people.” “Pocahontas.” And then
the volume will move on to “Piggy.” “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 brutality of his
language or the heedlessness of his behavior. His supporters continue
to excuse his insouciant cruelty as “Trump being Trump,” proof of
his authenticity. (The antisemitism of Nick Fuentes
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Tucker Carlson
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and a gaggle of group-chatting young Republican leaders is, similarly,
included in the “big tent” of _MAGA_ rhetoric.) Now, when a friend
begins a conversation with “Did you hear what Trump said today?,”
you do your best to dodge the subject. What’s the point? And yet the
President really did seem to break through to a new level of
degradation this week.
This past weekend brought a terrible and rapid succession of violent
events. On Saturday afternoon, in Providence, an unidentified gunman
on the Brown University campus
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shot and killed two students and wounded nine others in the midst of
exam period. The killer has yet to be found. On Sunday, in Archer
Park, near Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, a father-and-son team,
both dressed in black and heavily armed, reportedly took aim at a
crowd of Jewish men, women, and children who were 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 series of
antisemitic incidents in Australia—and beyond.
Finally, on Sunday night, came the news that the actor and filmmaker
Rob Reiner
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and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had been found dead in their
home. Their bodies were discovered by their daughter Romy. Los Angeles
police arrested their son, the thirty-two-year-old Nick Reiner.
According to press reports, the investigation had focussed on him
immediately not only because of his history of drug abuse but also
because he had been behaving erratically the night before, in his
parents’ presence, at a holiday party at the home of Conan
O’Brien. Nick Reiner is being held, without bail, in Los Angeles
County jail.
There was something about these three events that came in such rapid
succession that it savaged the spirit—the yet-again regularity of
American mass shootings, this time in Providence; the stark Jew hatred
behind the slaughter in Australia; the sheer sadness of losing such a
beloved and decent figure in the popular culture, and his wife,
purportedly at the hands of their troubled son. It would be naïve to
think that any leader, any clergy, could ease all that pain with a
gesture or a speech. Barack Obama speaking and singing “Amazing
Grace”
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from the pulpit in Charleston, South Carolina, or Robert F. Kennedy
speaking in Indianapolis on the night of the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr.—that kind of moral eloquence is somehow beyond our
contemporary imaginations and expectations. What you would not expect
is for a President of the United States to make matters even worse
than they were. But, of course, he did. “A very sad thing happened
last night in Hollywood,” Trump wrote, on Truth Social, on Monday.
He went on
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!
There is a lot to unpack here, from the shaky grammar to the decorous
use of “passed away” to the all-caps diagnosis to the hideously
gleeful sign-off: “rest in peace!” Future Trump scholars will sort
through the details with the necessary deliberation. But it requires
no deep thinking to assess Trump’s meaning. As if to assure the
country that this was no passing case of morning dyspepsia, he
declared, at a press conference, later in the day (using the kingly
third-person approach) that Reiner “was a deranged person, as far as
Trump is concerned.”
In the wake of the shocking death of Charlie Kirk
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in September, there were many in the President’s circle who were
quick to insist on the proper language of tragedy and mourning, and to
ostracize those who failed to use it. As a citizen and an ardent
liberal, Reiner was a harsh critic of the President; nor did his
politics even remotely align with those of Charlie Kirk. Yet, when
Reiner was asked about Kirk’s murder, he called it “an absolute
horror,” and told Piers Morgan, “That should never happen to
anybody. I don’t care what your political beliefs are.” And, when
Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, delivered a speech of forgiveness at
her husband’s memorial service in Arizona, Reiner was moved. “What
she said, to me, was beautiful,” he said. “She forgave his
assassin, and I think that is admirable.”
Remember what the President said by way of reply to Erika Kirk’s
gesture of Christian love? “I _hate_ my opponent, and I don’t want
the best for them.” And he said this in a _eulogy._ And so it is
worth asking, do you know anyone quite as malevolent? At your place of
work? On your campus? A colleague? A teacher? Much less someone whose
impulses and furies in no small measure dictate the direction, fate,
and temper of the country? Have you ever in your life encountered a
character as wretched as Donald Trump? ♦
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David Remnick [[link removed]]
has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer
since 1992. He is the author of seven books; the most recent is
“Holding the Note
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a collection of his profiles of musicians.
* Rob Reiner; Donald Trump; Brown University; Australia;
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