Trump's mouth

It just keeps going and going. And so, less noticed but still critically, do the mouths of his enemies.

I’m no big follower of what happens in Hollywood, but even I recognized the name Rob Reiner when it hit the news this last weekend. He and his wife Michelle were knifed to death by their 32 year-old son Nick, who apparently has been on drugs for years, at least since he was a teenager. It was a shocking story to cap off a bad, bad weekend, what with the Brown shootings and Bondi Beach massacre of Jews.

Rob Reiner was a hugely successful and popular producer and director. He made (to name only two of many) “When Harry Met Sally” and “Stand by Me,” two of the most entertaining and memorable movies I’ve ever seen. The former featured the stay-with-you-forever line, “I’ll have what she’s having,” said by the restaurant customer (played by Rob Reiner’s wife no less). Ms. Reiner was portraying a middle-aged lady at the next table in a diner when Sally decided to prove that Harry was entirely wrong in insisting that a woman couldn’t fake an orgasm during sex. “I’ll have what she’s having” resonates in my brain right along with the Godfather’s “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

The other movie, “Stand by Me,” is about four 12 year-old boys, all buddies from a rural school in Indiana, who go off on a mid-summer search for a body rumor has it is off in the woods. The story is ostensibly about their adventures and how they deal with the teenage bullies who confront them when they find what they’ve been looking for. What it’s actually about is friendship, fidelity, growing up, grief, comfort, love spoken in a different name, courage, letting go, and living with the memory of the treasures time and fortune take from you — then replace with different treasures, and different losses. Having had my own group of buddies when I was that age, and thinking about where they’ve gone now, “Stand by Me” rattled my cage. Because my life, much later, still features love spoken in a different name, and loss, it still does.

But I digress. Reiner was, not just a top Hollywood producer, but a Big Liberal (as many such people are). He spent time harshly criticizing Trump and Trump’s policies, but no more so than many other Hollywood figures.

When news of his death broke on Sunday night, the President issued the following message on his Truth Social account:

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…

What can you say about something like this? Maybe the first thing is its disconnect from truth. There’s not a smidgen of evidence that Nick Reiner had any particular thoughts about Trump and still less that such thoughts, if they existed, had anything to do with the murders. And beyond that………yikes. Trump’s degree of self-importance, self-absorption, tone-deafness, callousness and classlessness is beyond my vocabulary to describe. I knew by the time I was 12 — don’t we all? — that you do not badmouth someone who died in the immediate aftermath of his death. Weeks or months later, well, yes, maybe if you must, although with even a modicum of maturity and understanding, you could remember them for the good they did and the gifts they left behind, which in Reiner’s case is plenty.

That’s what we’d expect from just an ordinary person, not to mention someone who, like the President of the United States, is supposed to be (or at least in the olden days was supposed to be) a guide for dignified behavior.

When I was 12, Dwight Eisenhower was President. The chances that Eisenhower would say anything remotely similar to what Trump did are between zero and zero. Liberals will differ I’m sure, but to me, among the worst of Trump’s deficits as President is his all but complete failure to show the dignity, sobriety and grace we have a right to expect, or at the minimum hope for, in someone of that station.

And there’s this too: It’s not just that it’s a failure per se. It’s a failure with a political cost. When Trump’s policies aren’t producing, or at least are producing fast enough (see Paul’s post here), he could use a reservoir of good will to help sustain a decent popularity level. But his narcissism and frequent childish bullying make that unlikely if not impossible. It will take more luck than most people have to avoid paying a price in the mid-terms next year.

Still, as ever with Trump and his enemies, there’s another side to the story, a side the press is too dishonest and self-serving to tell. I found out about this part of it in the Silver Bulletin put out by Nate Silver — a man with the increasingly rare, and increasingly valuable, traits of being simultaneously liberal and honest.

Silver assays one of the Left’s leading “influencers,” a Harvard-trained Boston University professor named Heather Cox Richardson. Prof. Richardson’s Substack, “Letters from an American”, had “seemed like an unlikely hit when it first spun out of a series of Facebook posts late in Trump’s first term. But, as Silver notes, it has since only grown in influence. It currently ranks #3 on the U.S. Politics bestseller list, by far Substack’s most popular category.” It has millions of followers, to the point that Silver describes it as something like the Democratic Party’s Tea Party.

And one other thing: It published an unrepentant smear job. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not just DJT doing the dirty work, despite the press’s demanding that you think so. Prof. Richardaon’s Substack passed along poisonous misinformation about the political identity of Charlie Kirk’s killer to her 2.7 million-person-strong email list:

But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.

Rather than grappling with reality, right-wing figures are using Kirk’s murder to prop up their fictional world. Briefly, they claimed Robinson had been “radicalized” in college. Then, when it turned out he had spent only a single semester at a liberal arts college before going to trade school, MAGA pivoted to attack those who allegedly had celebrated Kirk’s death on social media.

Is any of that true? Silver — again, an honest liberal — spills the beans:

After having speculated without evidence that Robinson was a “Groyper” who had killed Kirk for being insufficiently conservative, Richardson was proven wrong by subsequent events. But she made no effort to correct the record, and her misleading interpretation traveled widely. There is possibly even a thread between Richardson’s newsletter and Jimmy Kimmel getting suspended, for example, after he repeated a similar theory on his show.

And the kicker (for at least this small but influential corner of the media):

I agree with Joshua A. Cohen…that this seems like a revealing moment for Democratic politics. That such an influential person, a history PhD from Harvard who claims to be highly concerned about misinformation, would commit a misinformation misdemeanor of her own — that seems significant. Democrats have had their problems with epistemic bubbles, but this one hit a little differently.

As is obvious by now, both Paul and I have problems with Trump’s frequent, devil-may-care dishonesty and, more than that, his willingness aggressively to stuff it in your face. The difference we have with most media is that we are unwilling to ignore the fact that the Left, time after time, is as bad or worse and is routinely more cocksure, arrogant and sanctimonious about it, as it has been for essentially all our lives. The ideological identity of Kirk’s assassin is a prime example. Given the multiple attempts to murder Trump, its attempts to murder Justice Kavanaugh and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and what all this implies about the Left’s willingness to use violence, it was crucial to the Left to try to pin Kirk’s assassination on someone from the Right. And so it did — “without evidence,” to use its now shopworn phrase — and it refuses to apologize or even acknowledge its misreporting.

Did Trump reveal — again — something really bad about his character with his reaction to Rob Reiner’s death? Yes, he did, and the country is worse for it. But his enemies do the same thing day after day, without relent, apology or even a passing acknowledgement. Instead, in the mainstream media, their parade of partisan smearing gets shoved under the rug. That won’t happen on Ringside.