(Dobbs) Trump says "TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME" led to Rob Reiner's murderWouldn’t you think Trump could at least have opened a small space in his sick mind to show sympathy in a case like this?
After news broke last night about the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner, Hollywood and Hollywood fans exploded with sympathy and sadness. He had given us endless laughs as an actor on “All in the Family,” then endless emotions directing everything from “A Few Good Men” to “When Harry Met Sally.” It was Reiner who put his own mother Estelle in the diner booth behind Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in that movie when Ryan loudly faked an orgasm and Reiner’s mother told her server, “I’ll have what she’s having.” But there was no sympathy or sadness, nothing genuine anyway, from Donald Trump. He doesn’t have the capacity. Before eight o’clock this morning, before the Reiners’ corpses were even cold, his post on his website began this way: “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.” This was over the top, even for Trump. Shortly after he put up his spiteful post today, police arrested the Reiners’ son Nick for their murder. The “anger” that Trump says Rob Reiner caused others because of Trump Derangement Syndrome never came up. True, Rob Reiner was a political activist and he publicly opposed just about everything Donald Trump stands for. In an interview with Variety during the president’s first term, Reiner called him “mentally unfit” and “the single-most unqualified human being to ever assume the presidency of the United States.” So sure, just as Rob Reiner wasn’t Donald Trump’s biggest fan, Trump wasn’t Reiner’s. But didn’t people who are now close to Trump— like his own vice president and his secretary of state— once say equally nasty things about the man before they hitched their stars to him? I know that Trump doesn’t do a lot of things we expect a president to do, like trying to comfort a country when a widely admired public figure dies, but wouldn’t you think he could at least have opened a small space in his sick mind to show sympathy in a case like this? Or at least to fake it? The second half of Trump’s post about Reiner was just as sick, with an overdose of ego: “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!” This is not just me talking. It’s even some of the most conservative people in America, like Kentucky congressman Tom Massie. “Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner,” Massie wrote on X, “this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered. I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.” Massie makes a good point. When will Trump’s MAGA minions stop cutting him slack? When will they stand up and say, maybe we admire how direct he is, how blunt he is, how honest he is about his feelings, but this goes beyond the mere retribution he promised. This has finally crossed the line? Share Remember when Trump ally Charlie Kirk was shot dead earlier this year in Utah? Remember when Trump went on national TV that night and called Kirk’s assassination “the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.” Coming from this president, that only applied to one side of the aisle. Or at least it doesn’t apply to him. Just to show you how ugly and unrepentant Donald Trump truly is, although there has been blowback to his ugly social media post, this afternoon in the Oval Office he was asked about Reiner. His response? “He was a deranged person. I thought he was very bad for our country.” Does the man have no dignity, no sympathy, no shame? How can there be anyone left in America who supports a monstrous man like this? He doesn’t deserve the designation of president, he doesn’t deserve the designation of leader. He barely deserves the designation of human being. Leave a comment Upgrade to paid Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. He also has been a consultant for the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab. |