Trump Widens the Breach With Common Decency

The Felon has long been an ongoing example of moral bankruptcy who goes through life with no regard for common decency.  Despite this, evangelicals have flocked to his standard, motivated by promises of special rights and the normalization of outright racism and bigotry that are a constant undercurrent of the Felon's regime.  When class and decency are required, one can depend on the Felon to follow a different path and state horrible things about people, revel in cruelty, and always somehow turn  everything into about himself.  In the wake of the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, rather than take the high road or even say nothing, the Felon showed his true ugly self. Rather than mumble benign platitudes, the Felon mocked Reiner and his death, demonstrating yet again that he time and time again always rejects decency and instead embraces ugliness.  Surprisingly, some Republicans and some self-styled evangelical leaders condemned the Felon's crude and insensitive statements. The Felon's response? He doubled down on his ugly remarks and showed us all who he really is. In the process, the Felon again did damage to the social fabric of the nation.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the ugly situation:

When Rob Reiner died violently alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, yesterday, a familiar thing happened in American public life: a window opened.

It opened not because Reiner, a vocal liberal, was universally beloved or politically neutral, but because his work occupied shared cultural space. The National Review writer Jeffrey Blehar quoted Mary Katherine Ham, another conservative writer, in an article lauding the director and actor: Reiner was a “VHS King”—a filmmaker whose movies fused themselves to childhoods, relationships, and formative memories. The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally—even people who disagreed with Reiner’s politics had lived inside worlds he helped create. His death therefore moved beyond private tragedy into collective recognition about a set of shared reference points. That is what opens the window: common memory, common shock, common vulnerability.

When the country confronts something as horrible as the Reiners’ killing, it is destabilizing. When the victim is someone we feel we knew or whose work helped us know ourselves, the moment may be more so. These breaches present leaders with an opportunity to stay quiet. Let the poets and the priests and rabbis take over. Leave room for the fan whose perfect tribute captures the nation. If the leader can’t help but comment, the best they can offer is containment. In crisis psychology, people calm when they sense boundaries around chaos. In today’s world, what that looks like is a leader who acknowledges grief even if it’s not their own, or who affirms that all is not chaos when a major rupture happens.

During a weekend that also included a deadly shooting at Brown University and a massacre at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, the country was already shaken. Containment was needed more than ever.

What was not called for—in the moment, in the psychology handbook, or in the traditions of the American presidency—was Donald Trump’s response.

On Truth Social today, the president mocked Reiner, suggesting that his death was the result of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—a “mind-crippling disease,” he called it, suggesting, obviously without evidence, that Reiner’s criticism of Trump had invited his death. Trump did something worse than mock. He blamed a murdered man for his own murder, while the Reiners’ own son sits in custody on suspicion of killing them. Trump used a family tragedy against a dead man.

This was not merely irresponsible, nor simply another example of norm-breaking rhetoric. It actively widened the breach. He didn’t affirm human boundaries; he punctured them to display dominance. Grief became a plaything. Shock became his permission.

It was not just what Trump said, but what he refused to do. Presidents have unique tools. They can slow the emotional spin of events. They can affirm shared moral grammar: that the dead are off-limits, that suffering warrants restraint, that power bows—briefly—to loss, that no act by a political foe can erase those truths, that leaders uphold standards. Trump used none of those tools.

Trump’s defenders often describe him as a “daddy” figure—strong, unconcerned with elite expectations. Accept that framing, and Trump’s failure in this moment becomes larger, not smaller. . . . A parent signals safety, a backstop. Trump instead signaled that nothing is protected, and no shared floor exists.

In moments when the country looks up for orientation, Trump does not steady the room. He destabilizes it. He does not merely break norms; he erodes the conditions that make shared meaning possible. Where Reiner built a national cultural space—worlds we could all inhabit together—Trump dissolves it. He takes the scaffolding we’ve constructed and sets it on fire.

Rather than setting a tone of decency for the country, the Felon revels in pettiness and mistreatment of perceived opponents, deliberate cruelty towards undocumented immigrants, and the murder of those on alleged "drug boats" - still no evidence has been produced -  and moral degeneracy in general.