Reiner's Death -Trump's Narcissism
Reiner's Death—Trump's Narcissism
I don't go to funerals. I don't go to weddings. I have experienced enough of both to know that ceremony rarely captures the truth of the thing it claims to honor. But this moment demands something more than my usual distance.
Rob Reiner is dead. His wife, Michele Singer Reiner, is dead. They were found in their home in Brentwood, stabbed to death by their own son. Nick Reiner, thirty-two, now sits in a suicide-prevention smock, a hollowed-out man facing a judge.
Then there is Trump.
He didn't offer reflection. He didn't find the grace to stay silent for forty-eight hours. He looked at the blood on the floor in Brentwood and saw a chance to settle a score with a ghost.
"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."
To look at a double homicide—a son butchering his parents—and link it to a lack of political fealty is a stretch even for a narcissistic moron. But it is more than just narcissism. It is the singular, unyielding truth of his existence: everything, from the movement of the tides to the spilling of blood, must be viewed through the lens of his own ego.
This isn't a new reflex. It is the core of the man.
On September 11, 2001, while the smoke from three thousand ghosts was still drifting over Lower Manhattan, Trump called a television station. He didn't talk about the heroes in the stairwells. He talked about his square footage.
"Forty Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan," he said. "And now it's the tallest."
The towers were still hot. People were jumping because the air had turned to fire. And he was measuring his ego against a mass grave.
When John McCain died in 2018, the United States lowered its flags. Trump ordered them raised. He sat in the Oval Office and glowered because the country dared to honor a man who wasn't him. He held a grudge against a dead man because McCain had been a prisoner of war while Trump was avoiding his own service with a doctor's note. If someone else is being honored, he feels he is being robbed.
In 2016, after forty-nine people were slaughtered at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he took a victory lap. "Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism," he posted. He treated a massacre like a winning ticket at a dog track.
Even a global pandemic was just another set of ratings. He talked about his television numbers while people were dying in hallways.
Now we have the Reiners.
In the world of PrumpTutin, there is no such thing as a private tragedy. Everything is fodder for the machine. The logic is lean and lethal: if you don't worship the power, you deserve the blade. Trump didn't just mock the dead; he suggested the murder was the natural biological consequence of dissent. He effectively wrote the killer's defense, telling the United States that Reiner "drove people crazy" with his obsession.
I don't write obituaries. I don't believe in the poetry of the end. But the United States has lost its way because it has lost its shame. We have a leader who looks at a family's annihilation and sees a mirror. He looks at a father and mother murdered by their own child and his first thought is how it reflects on his own greatness.
The silence of the others is what brought me here. They are waiting for the storm to pass. They don't realize that the storm is the system now. It is time we admitted what we are looking at: a man who cannot stand to let the dead have their peace if they didn't give him theirs.
