Trump Turns Murder Into a Punchline—and Calls It Politics
David Shuster exposes how cruelty has become Trump’s only remaining governing principle
By David Shuster
Just when it seems Donald Trump has scraped the very bottom of verbal and political depravity, he smashes another nail into the coffin of his own credibility. And this time, the vulgarity is so grotesque, the evil is so clear, that even Trump’s most hardened supporters are recoiling.
The occasion? The brutal murder of Hollywood star Rob Reiner and his wife. It’s an event that would normally summon at least the barest flicker of human empathy.
Instead, Trump delivered a social media rant that managed to make his previous shocking indecencies look almost quaint. Trump blamed Reiner for his own murder. Trump produced a sneering, gloating monologue on Truth Social that blasted Reiner, a progressive activist, for having the temerity to oppose Trump while alive.
Trump wrote: “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!”
To call this graceless would be generous; it is more like moral spoliation. Anyone with a scrap of decency — might offer condolences, a recognition of pain, a pause in the eternal campaign.
Trump transforms grief into a grotesque political diatribe.
And let’s be clear: blaming a victim of violence for provoking their own death is not merely cruel. It is moral rot. It is the logic of the crazed mob, the whisper that they had it coming, the language historically employed by cowards who want brutality to feel justified. When it comes from the mouth of a U.S. President, it is not just indecent. It is dangerous.
A few of Trump’s defenders insist, as they always do, that this is merely “Trump being Trump,” as if that were an explanation rather than an indictment. The MAGATs are muttering about free speech, about jokes, about how Trump’s critics are too sensitive. But humor requires wit, and wit requires intelligence. This is neither. It is pure spite, stripped of even the pretense of comedy. Trump is celebrating murder.
Thankfully, the reaction across most of the U.S. political spectrum has been swift and damning.
Social media users of all stripes have called the president’s commentary what it is—“one sick f***,” “psychotic,” and an act of unthinkable cruelty. Even some of Trump’s own supporters have recoiled, labeling the post “heartless” and urging its deletion. Several lawmakers from Trump’s own party can’t quite look away either, condemning the tone-deaf performance as disrespectful and inappropriate. Public figures and entertainers have joined the chorus, branding the Trump remarks as corrupt, narcissistic, and lacking shame
What is striking to so many Americans is not merely the absence of Trump’s empathy, but the reflexive Trump contempt for ordinary human dignity. A national leader — even an embattled president — is expected to toe some line of elementary respect in the face of human tragedy. Trump is not merely ignorant of this expectation; he laughs at it, hoots like a hyena in the petting zoo of human suffering. He seems to believe that every moment of national grief is another chance to remind the world that he remains the center of all things, that all pain is a backdrop for his ego’s grand parade.
This is a form of verbal necrophilia — the defilement of dead names for the sake of self-aggrandizement. It is the heinous belief that a bloody murder scene or cold cemetery is just another campaign backdrop, that the grief of others is fair game for a rallying cry. One wonders if decency itself has been outlawed in Trump’s demented and deranged imagination.
A healthy society would uniformly drop Trump like a bad habit or excise him like a cancerous tumor. A sick society shrugs, notes that 36% of all Americans still approve of Trump, and waits for the next outrage, already trained, already numb. Trump relies on that numbness. He depends on it. He is not trying to persuade; he is trying to degrade—to drag the standards of public life so low that his own behavior seems inevitable, even normal.
It is not.
It is the behavior of a man unfit not only for office, but for the most basic obligations of citizenship. It is the sound of moral collapse, typed out on social media in all caps.
And yet, tomorrow, Trump will do it again—because he can, because he has learned that there is always a disgraceful and disgusting floor somewhere beneath the last one.
Trump does not ask whether he should go lower. He just sinks further into his insidious, immoral, toxic stench.
It is beyond horrifying.
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Thanks David for this needed column. You paint this vile bottom feeding wretch with the right color. I hope for the day the headline will read, He is dead. We as a nation need to rid ourselves of this plague.