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There are moments when death demands humility, compassion, and moral restraint. Donald Trump, more often than not, answers such moments with cruelty. His reaction to the deaths of actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, is not merely a morally repugnant expression of indecency; it is emblematic of an age in which ruthless brutality has become a political style and empathy is treated as a weakness, if not a toxic infirmity.

While Trump’s post about Reiner on Truth Social started off in a relatively straightforward manner, calling the deaths “a very sad thing,” it devolved by the second sentence:

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!

What should have been a moment of collective mourning was instead seized as an opportunity for ridicule, revenge, hatred, and ideological warfare.

Trump’s response exposes the ugliness at the core of his personality and politics. Two people were murdered, a family was shattered, and yet he responds not with gravity, restraint, or even the pretense of compassion, but instead with gleeful malice, attacking Reiner for the unforgivable crime of refusing to affirm Trump’s corrupt, reactionary, white supremacist worldview — even insinuating that Reiner’s political beliefs may have caused Reiner’s death. This is not simply self-absorption run amok; it is the moral signature of a political culture in which cruelty is normalized, public life is stripped of ethical considerations, and suffering becomes raw material for spectacle and punishment. This is not an aberrant outburst or a momentary lapse. It is the logic of a political identity shaped by ethical tranquilization, hatred, authoritarianism, and a culture that treats cruelty as a form of power.

More broadly, Trump’s conversion of Reiner’s death into an occasion for political opportunism, at a moment that demands humility and collective grief, exposes a deeper rot at work, one that reflects a culture steeped in cruelty, organized indifference, and the collapse of social responsibility. Unable to acknowledge suffering beyond his own ego, he turns public life into a theater of dehumanization and punishment, targeting critics for their refusal to submit to his authoritarian imagination.........

© Truthout