Dear Everybody:
So, we’re about to go to war with Venezuela, health care looks like it’s going to go over a cliff, and Trump is openly allying himself with Putin and Russia and against NATO, and yet that’s not the big story of the day. What is? you ask. Trump’s loathsome response to Rob Reiner’s death:
--The whole thing has taken on a life of its own, with virtually everyone weighing in to condemn what Trump said, and I’d call it a firestorm, but that doesn’t quite do it. More like a nuclear bomb going off, and several people are saying this is it, this is the tipping point that will alienate MAGA once and for all.
--I’m not quite so hopeful, but Trump’s definitely made a big mistake here, and I think one of the reasons he did (besides him being a complete sociopath who’s devoid of feeling) is that he thought of Reiner as a political enemy like, say, Nancy Pelosi’s husband or John McCain and assumed all his followers would, too, whereas most of them thought of Reiner as the guy who did SPINAL TAP or THE PRINCESS BRIDE or WHEN HARRY MET SALLY. They thought of him as a Hollywood star and a guy they liked in the movies, not a politico, and I’ll bet you most of them were completely unaware that he was a Democratic activist. Kind of like how he miscalculated with Jimmy Kimmel, only worse.
--As witness to how out of control this whole thing is getting, this afternoon a famous pro wrestler who has been a Trump supporter, Mick Foley, announced that he is cutting ties with the WWE over its close connections to Trump. He says the last straw for him was Trump’s remarks about Reiner.
And Trump still hasn’t tumbled to what he did because yesterday afternoon he doubled down:
--When CNN asked him about the criticism he’d gotten from Republicans, he said, "I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person...I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any way, shape, or form. I thought he was very bad for our country."
--Charlie Sykes: "For fuck’s sake."
--Political speechwriter Zev Karlin Neumann: "I know his staff is beyond shame, but each and every one of them should feel utterly embarrassed to work for a human this badly broken."
--Meidas Touch: "Gavin Newsom called Trump ‘a sick man.’ Franklin Leonard, founder of the Black List, wrote that every time he sees something ‘this far beyond the pale,’ he thinks it cannot possibly be real, and ‘every time I’m wrong.’ Neera Tanden observed that ‘we have never had a person of worse character as President of the United States.’ These reactions were not partisan outrage. They were moral judgments."
--Everybody who hadn’t weighed in already did, calling what he said "a travesty," "new depths of depravity," "atrocious," "revolting," "despicable," and "utterly shameless."
--News Corpse: "It was among the most nauseating things he has ever said, and that’s saying something. Donald Trump continues to sink to ever deeper depths of depravity. His comment on the tragic death of Rob Reiner is impeachably grotesque. And as usual, reeks with the stink of his massive yet fragile ego."
--Editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Russell Moore: "How this vile, disgusting, and immoral behavior has become normalized in the US is something our descendants will study in school, to the shame of our generation."
--Rock star Jack White; "Trump, you disgusting vile egomaniacal loser child. Neither he nor any one of his followers can defend this gross, horrible insult to a beautiful artist who gave the world so much. To use someone’s tragicdeth to promote your own vanity and fascist authoritarian agenda is a corrupt and narcissistic sin. Shame on you, Trump, and anyone who defends this. God bless you, Rob Reiner, and thank you for what you gave the world. I never even met you and I will stand by you."
--"Seth Meyers: "It was even worse than I’d imagined. The President made it about himself because he is incapable of making it about anything else. Their death is a tragedy to anyone with an ounce of humanity--but you do need that one ounce."
--Rick Wilson of Rob Reiner: "He was, at bottom, a human being, smart, funny, warm, present, there. The kind you expect to still be in the world because the world needs men like that to stay upright."
--southpaw: "Speaking ill of the dead is controversial, particularly when it was a violent death. It’s edgy, it’s sensitive, best avoided in most cases, etc. Baselessly making another person’s murder about yourself and then approving of it is a different thing. That is delusional, narcissistic, sociopathic."
--Rick Wilson: "There are days when the world stacks tragedy and pain and violent evil, one after another, waves of blood rolling over our screens and souls. This was a weekend of evil."
--Adam Parkhomenko and Sam Youngman summed it up the best: "Evil in Australia, tragedy in Tinseltown, and the President is a soulless psycho."
Some on the right were disgusted, too:
--GOP Rep Don Bacon: "I’d expect to hear something like this from a drunk guy at a bar, not the President of the United states. Can the president be presidential?"
--GOP Rep Mike Lawler: "This statement is wrong. Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subject to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period."
--Jonathan Turley: "Absent is any sense of restraint in light of this tragedy or any consideration for this grieving family."
--Meghan McCain: "This is awful, cruel, and beneath President Trump." (Really? What about his calling your father a loser and saying, "I like people who weren’t captured?")
--Guy Benson: "Gross."
--Andy McCarthy: "No words. I mean, disgraceful, appalling, atrocious--these are words, but they don’t do it justice."
--Even co-election-fraud-conspirator Jenna Ellis said it was horrible and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.
But the rest did what they always do, trying to explain why it isn’t what you know it is, why it isn’t all that bad, trying to paper it over and make excuses.
--Some said Trump was just being honest and shouldn’t be expected to eulogize his critics. (Though when Charlie Kirk died, it was a different story. Over 600 people LOST THEIR JOBS because they refused to eulogize Kirk, and most of them were simply quoting things Kirk had said.) Others claimed Trump wasn’t celebrating Rob Reiner’s death.
--And others thought he was right. Kurt Schlichter: "It’s pretty pathetic to be so fake and fussy because Trump was insufficiently cordial to a guy who targeted him for nonstop bile for the last decade."
--Laura Loomer’s defense of Trump was nearly as disgusting as Trump’s own post, which is going some: "Trump is right. Reiner himself sounded insane when he would speak. Imagine how crazy his own son was...on drugs...you’ll notice a lot of celebrities have kids with addictions, trans kids, gay kids, spoiled kids, kids who commit crimes, and kids who are total deadbeat losers..."
--Robert Lusetich said Guy Gutfield was the Gold Medal Winner for Moral Ambiguity Contortionism with his comment: "In my filter Trump is always words vs. deeds. I don’t have to like what he says. In fact, I could hate what he says...we don’t have to like it, but just look at the deeds, but I get why you’re upset."
And people openly speculated over whether this was the thing that would take Trump down:
--Dartagnan: "It may or may not be a tipping point, but it is a very serious unforced error at a very bad time for this administration."
--Ben Jacobs: "Republicans are less willing to excuse the inexcusable, like his post about Reiner. Even if he’s still an incumbent popular among the GOP faithful, Trump is no longer the political juggernaut he was only months ago."
--Daily Kos called this a real tipping point and said, "If this trend continues, Trump will not only find himself without a majority in Congress, but without support from what remains of the GOP. Nobody will want to be associated with someone who disparages beloved Americans who were taken from us far too soon."
--Process Driver: "He’s worried. He knows how sick he is and is terrified of it. He knows how weak he looks. He knows he’s failing and he hates failure. He hates how people are talking about him and how it’s out in the open. He’s confused, tired, and paranoid all the time. He knows there’s not much time left. He knows."’
--Alex Jones (yes, THAT Alex Jones!) said he was "very concerned" about the president’s future. He asked Marjorie Taylor Greene on his show, "So can Trump be saved?"
--Greene: "Well, you should be concerned, and everyone is concerned...Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for himself and his words. What he said about Rob Reiner, look, we don’t agree with Rob Reiner politically, but what happened to his family is a horrible tragedy. The president of the United States, if he said anything at all, his comments should have been empathy...and he should have strictly stuck with that."
--Alex Jones: "We can put the statement up, but I’m sorry folks...I’m not trying...the headline, Jones turns on Trump. No, I’m like Trump needs to have people that’ll intervene and say, "What are you doing?...This is a horrible move by Trump!"
--Marjorie Taylor Greene: "I’ve seen reactions from every spectrum of MAGA. People have called it out because we’re done with it...this isn’t...what is wrong in his head?"
--Alex Jones: "It’s like, talk about narcissism. It’s literally, it’s literally Trump saying, ‘Oh, you talk bad about me, you die.’" (Note: I have NEVER heard the right wing talk like this about Trump.)
One of the problems is that Trump’s Rob Reiner comments followed several public appearances last week in which he appeared less than coherent and sane:
--At the Christmas party on Sunday for Trump loyalists, Trump disparaged everyone there, talked about how his "arc" was going to blow the Arc de Triomphe away, said the California election was rigged and he will win it next time, and then launched into a 10-minute story about a poisonous snake that had bit a doctor in attendance while he was on tour with the Obama girls (and made it somehow their fault.) He said it was the most venomous snake in the world (not true--that would be a snake in Australia) and that 28,000 people die from this snake’s bite in Peru every year (also not true--the number is 6) and said the doctor was dead three times (who knows.)
--Trump: "Then he gets hit by a viper--this is a terrible Christmas story but it’s a hell of a story. It takes only a minute.
--Trump: "The chances of living from that snake are substantially less than 1 per cent, and that’s only if you have the venom. Even if you have the venom, you don’t live." (He means antivenom.)
--Halfway through, he stopped because he saw someone in the crowd who he thought looked like Ivanka. "Boy, you look like Ivanka! I say, is that Ivanka?" and then went on and on about how beautiful she was.
--Trump: "This is an automatic death...he’s being read his rights, they carried him out, giving him the antivenom, they thought he was dead three times, unconscious for many weeks, this was a real...Did they ever find the snake, by the way?...Look how quiet it is, you know when you talk about snakes and things like that, people find it interesting..."
--Trump: "I’m fascinated by stories of wildlife because I have a theory: wildlife always wins."
--buzzenup: "What? What the fuck was that?"
--Whitman Wade Brown: "Okay, grandpa, I think it's time for you to lie down."
--Gary: "What the fuck was that? This was his Merry Christmas speech? Did they ever find the snake? He (Trump) asked him how he’s doing like he actually talked to the guy? Everyone’s so quiet because they are wondering how long it takes to impeach a delusional, demented moron!"
--Jeff Tiedrich: "I swear we’re in ‘I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time,’ territory."
--Seth Meyers did the best job of covering this, and you can watch the whole thing on his "A Closer Look." He said flatly that "Snakes are not Christmas. That is a hill I am willing to die on." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XocOZgQpIX8
--So he went straight from that to his tirade about Rob Reiner. And now, in what is obviously a last-ditch effort to change the subject, he has announced a speech on Wednesday in which he will make a big "mystery announcement."
In health care news:
--It looks like the Republicans are in fact going to take all of us right over a cliff and let the ACA subsidies expire. (They expire December 31st, and the Senate’s going home on Tuesday and the House on Thursday.)
--Cliff Schecter: "Killing ACA subsidies will hurt 24 million Americans--and finish the GOP."
--The Atlantic: "15 years after its passage, the ACA is a gigantic political pain point for the GOP...unlike pretty much every other conservative party in the industrialized world, where the legitimacy of universal health care is largely a given, the GOP seems resigned to bleed out on health care."
--There are some last-minute discharge petitions making the rounds which would extend the subsidies for one or two years, but even if they were able to get them to the floor, there’s no guarantee the Senate could act on them in time to keep the subsidies from lapsing.
--Trump’s response to dumping the ACA: "You make it sound so bad."
In historical news:
--Today marks Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary, with celebrations all over the place and special showings of her movies. (My daughter is going in costume to a screening of Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet’s SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.)
--Austen only wrote six books--MANSFIELD PARK, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, NORTHANGER ABBEY, PERSUASION, and EMMA--but they’ve had an out-sized impact on literature. All have been made into movies and TV series multiple times, and they’ve spawned a whole bunch of adaptations and sequels, like BRIDE AND PREJUDICE and CLUELESS.
--Winston Churchill read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE while he had pneumonia during World War II and said it brought a welcome distraction from the war and helped him get well. And when the philosopher Gilbert Ryle was asked if he ever read fiction, he famously said, "Oh, yes--all six, every year."
In resistance news:
--The Potawotami tribe, whose tribal board had agreed to build an ICE detention facility on their reservation, is furious with the board, has fired some of them and forced others to resign, and the tribe is now trying to get out of the contract.
--Gen Z protesters successfully overturned the government in Bulgaria with their mass protests. Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov announced his resignation.
--In Washington City, Oregon, high school kids staged a walkout in pouring rain to protest ICE.
In other news:
--Rob Reiner’s son has been formally charged with the murder of his parents.
--There are rumors that Kash Patel was the person who leaked the name of the "person of interest" that they later had to let go in regard to the Brown University shooting because the ballistics didn’t match.
--Jared Kushner’s firm pulled out of a project to redevelop a Serbian historical monument just hours after four of the Serbian officials involved were indicted for abuse of power and falsifying documents related to the project.
--The US struck 3 more boats in the Eastern Pacific, killing 8. That brings the death toll to 95.
In good news:
--A federal judge ordered the Trump administration and FEMA to restore billions of dollars in canceled disaster mitigation funding.
--Colorado’s Governor Polis told Trump he has no power to pardon Tina Peters.
--It’s only five days to the Winter Solstice and the darkest day of the year, after which we will start to climb back up into the light. Yay!
In Christmas news, Charles Dickens was so identified with Christmas that when he died, a little girl asked, "Is Christmas dead, too?" Luckily, the answer was no.
Best sign of the day, on a highway overpass where people protest all the time: "Santa Hates ICE."
Best comment of the day, from Andrew Sullivan: "Trump’s post about Rob Reiner is something I won’t post here. It’s not a mean tweet, it’s a genuine expression of profound mental illness mixed with delusional grandiosity and a callowness and narcissism beyond the capacity of anyone but true sociopaths. Enough of your excuses and dismissals, what-about-isms, and avoidance--He’s a deranged monster. He disgraces us all. All the time. The damage he is doing to the civic and moral core of this country is profound and irrevocable."
Keep calm and carry on,
Connie Willis