Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
I had the good fortune to meet Rob Reiner, professionally and socially, at a couple of different stages of our lives. The first time I encountered him, I was a TV critic at Newsweek and he was playing Archie Bunker’s son-in-law in the legendary sitcom “All in the Family.” I well remember the private screening of the first show, for me and critics from Time magazine and The New York Times, because the nervous handlers at CBS kept warning us that this was really radical comedy, like nothing a network had attempted before. You would have thought it involved pornography, to listen to them, or at least a Marxist worldview.
In fact all three of us loved it, as I recall, and enjoyed our interviews with Reiner and Carroll O’Connor. We all wrote enthusiastic reviews. The next time I met Rob Reiner he was on his way to becoming a celebrated film director. But he remembered the review, if not the reviewer, and was exceedingly kind and accessible. He was, as you must have gathered from the eulogies and tributes when he died, an unusually kind, funny, talented and generous individual. A mensch if there ever was one, in the words of a mutual friend.
Life is cruel, a cliché that’s too small to fit this case. As everyone in this country knows by now, Reiner died the most horrible death—-physically and psychologically—-of any person I’ve ever known. It appears that he and his wife were savagely murdered in their home by their own son, a drug addict with no history of violence. The dimensions of this atrocity are unlimited, more like Greek tragedy than a Hollywood horror film. It’s an irony that Reiner made two memorable films, “Stand By Me” and “Misery” that adapted the work of Stephen King. King, one of Rob’s eloquent eulogists, is remarkable for creating stories with a level of horror so profound that the average reader is trapped between fascination and revulsion. But even King couldn’t imagine anything more ghastly than the Dec.14 murders of Rob and Michele Reiner in a quiet upscale neighborhood in LA.
Try to put yourself in the place of their other adult children. But not before you try to go to sleep. The fallout from this act of parricidal madness will affect generations of the Reiners’ descendants. This is not about the Reiners, though, except in the sense that even the most ghastly nightmares might influence positive change. This is about the ghastly nightmare who now serves as President of the United States. Historians will record Donald Trump’s response to the tragedy, delivered on social media with no attempt at restraint—-and repeated in front of TV cameras—-as the most insensitive and demented message an American president has ever delivered in public.
Assuming, as he always has, that everything and everyone are all about him, Trump jumped to the conclusion that Reiner, a liberal anti-MAGA activist, was murdered by a Trump loyalist in some violent fit of political passion. He dismissed Reiner as “a deranged person,” a victim of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “very bad for our country.” I think it’s safe to say that there’s no other public figure, no small-town mayor or Chamber of Commerce president in this republic who would have said something so flagrantly cruel and insane on such an occasion. Remember when politicians used to be praised for “showing class”? When “class” was actually a qualification for higher office?
What’s next, I meant to ask while I was writing this, and it turned out to be the armed invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its president. Who is this man Trump, what evil could have reduced him to this condition? I think the simplest answer is that this is a human being whose cancerous ego has hollowed him out, devoured everything inside him until nothing recognizably human remains. Narcissism is a brain-wasting disease with no known cure, and this man is in the final stages. There’s a videotape where Rob Reiner recalls meeting Donald Trump, and remembers him as the most vain and self-involved conversationalist he ever encountered. And that’s from a film director whose professional success depended on his management of some of the most humongous egos in the world of entertainment.
In a few months in his second term in office, the President has demolished half the White House, renamed the Kennedy Center in his own honor, inquired about reserving a space on Mount Rushmore and lobbied for a Nobel Peace Prize. He has resurrected the Monroe Doctrine and invaded South America. One comedian claimed that he planned to paint the tip of the Washington Monument presidential orange and rename it Trump Tower. “Would-be dictator” doesn’t begin to cover the scope of Trump’s ambitions and delusions. He envisions himself as the Emperor of the Americas. Seriously.
When is enough “enough”? Can there be such a thing as “a final straw” in the case of Donald Trump, a point where a clear majority of Americans refuses to swallow any more? We know MAGA voters aren’t all anti-Semites, Q-Anon junkies and neo-Nazi creeps who carry swastikas and Confederate flags, though too many of them seem to be. Trump’s painfully extended career relies on one basic human response — the bigger our mistakes, the more we hate to admit to them. Life doesn’t offer many mistakes bigger than voting for Trump in 2024, and it’s some combination of stubbornness and secret shame that still holds his MAGA cult together.
“Inappropriate,” the most common criticism of Trump’s outburst after the Reiner murders, is understatement in the extreme. But there were a few Republican legislators, from our fawningly subservient Congress, who lodged stronger objections. “I challenge anyone to defend it,” said Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. “Most Americans want more and better from our president,” added Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, the onetime Trump sycophant turned shrill critic, said that she was appalled by the President’s failure of compassion. This is hardly a widespread rebellion. But it’s a start, at a moment when Trump is vulnerable on several fronts.
His Nazi-style war on immigrants, conducted by masked storm troopers and resulting in horrific mistakes and injustices, is popular only in parts of the country where there are hardly any immigrants. His showcase attempts to negotiate truces for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have been underwhelming at best. Judges everywhere, including his previously captive majority on the Supreme Court, have begun to warn him that he isn’t free to do as he chooses beyond the rule of law. And the documents from the Jeffrey Epstein trials make a convincing case that their long and close friendship could have put Trump in prison for pedophilia.
It’s been a while, now, since anyone who commands respect has expressed respect for Donald Trump. In Europe, where he seems determined to turn all our allies into enemies, polite people expressed bewildered embarrassment while impolite people laughed out loud. Then his absurdities and outrages multiplied until all of them began to groan and hold their breath.
Apparently the worst thing Rob Reiner said to earn the President’s undying hatred was that Trump is “mentally unfit” to be president. That’s about as controversial as saying that Ray Charles was “physically unfit” to drive a bus. For years now everyone who was close to the President has understood that he isn’t playing with a full deck. Now that they realize he doesn’t command enough cards for a game of euchre, who’s actually running this grotesque parody of an American government? Who manipulates the megalomaniac? The sinister ideologue Stephen Miller, the macho-mad flunky Pete Hegseth from Fox News?
But the buck stops at the Oval Office, and even if the man who sits there is no longer capable of a coherent speech or a rational decision, he’s the one who must be held responsible. A couple of weeks ago I saw a news item noting the anniversary of the execution of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. He was hanged for war crimes after the American military overthrew his government. The crimes he was charged with included killing Kurds in poison gas attacks and the massacre of a Shiite village. The body count was similar to the one the Trump administration has been running up against alleged “narco-terrorists” in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.
The United Nations, the world legal community and most American legal scholars define the incineration of these fishing boats and their crews as war crimes, way outside the rules of war or peace. “The thing that separates war from murder is the law,” as David French wrote in The New York Times. If the blame finds its way to the top, why doesn’t some responsible nation or coalition overthrow Trump’s government and prosecute him, as the United States did with Saddam in Iraq? No chance, of course, but only because America is a nuclear superpower and Iraq was not.
The prosecution rests its case. Sane arguments about Donald the Conqueror — a coarse, stupid, demented criminal — are all behind us now. But the nightmare has just begun.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays, with a fifth collection of essays, “Bible Belt Blues,” published in November 2025.
Email delennis1@gmail.com.
