The most extreme victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome is President Donald J. Trump himself.
And that has never been more apparent than in Trump’s post on Truth Social on Monday, after the younger son of director Rob Reiner and his wife was arrested as the prime suspect in their murder over the weekend.
Rob Reiner happened to have detected the root cause of Trump’s derangement at his first encounter with The Donald back in June of 1988. Reiner had been in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with Billy Crystal for the Mike Tyson vs. Michael Spinks fight when they encountered the man who is now our president.
“We just met him prior to the fight,” Reiner would recall in a 2017 Politico podcast. “We talked with him for a while.”
Reiner would not be able to recall what exactly they talked about. He would only remember the subject to which Trump repeatedly returned.
“I have worked with people who have the biggest egos in the world, you know, actors,” Reiner—himself an actor and a director of hit movies—said. “They have huge egos, and, you know, politicians have egos too. You wouldn’t go into that profession, whether it’s an actor or a politician, unless you had a need to be liked.”
But Trump was singular when it came to obsessive self-regard and involvement.
“I’ve never met somebody with as big an ego. I couldn’t believe it,” Reiner remembered. “He’s meeting Billy… He’s meeting me, and yet it’s only about him. And so I thought, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ Everything that we talked about came back to him. It always came back to him,... Doesn’t matter what we talked about, [it] came right back to him.”
Reiner also recalled on the podcast that his wife, the photographer Michele Singer Reiner, had taken the jacket photo for Trump’s book The Art of the Deal. Singer Reiner had been about to take a picture of him up on a high-rise under construction overlooking Central Park.
“The wind was blowing, and he said, ‘I got to get this hairspray, you know, I need this special hairspray,’” Reiner recounted. “So they went downstairs to get it, and when they walked down the street, people [were] going, ‘Hey, Donald! Donald!’ He was always larger than life, and he was always attractive in that, you know, charismatic celebrity way.”
Reiner was telling his tale in the second year of Trump’s first term, but he remained charitable as he continued.
“So, you know, I think that it matters, all that stuff matters,” Reiner said. “There’s a reason why Kennedy beat Nixon, you know, people heard that debate, they think Nixon won the debate. People saw the debate: Kennedy won that debate.”
Reiner had become less kind with regard to Trump’s politics. He shared the views his father, Carl Reiner—comedian and the creator of TV’s The Dick Van Dyke Show—expressed in a 2018 post on what was then still Twitter.
“Hi, I’m Carl Reiner. I’m 96 and a half years old, and I’ve seen a lot of things in my lifetime. I lived through the Great Depression. I served in World War II, in our fight to defeat fascism. I’ve seen the invention of television and performed on television even before my family owned one. What I’ve never seen is the American people being lied to every single day.”
Carl cited lies about everything from climate change to Medicare.
“The one thing I cannot bear to see is America being destroyed by racism, fear-mongering, and lies. Fortunately, there is something we can do about that.“
He called on people to vote in the midterm elections.
“On November 6th, we can vote for elected officials who will hold this president accountable, and after we’ve done that, my personal goal will be to stick around until 2020 and vote to make sure we have a decent, moral, law-abiding citizen in Washington.”
Carl Reiner died in June of 2020, five months before Trump was, in fact, voted out of office. Trump was subsequently convicted on felony charges of paying hush money to a porn star.
But Trump retained that celebrity charisma, and he proved a genius for image making when he was shot, rising with a bloody face, fist raised, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
As Trump returned to the White House, Reiner continued being his father’s son, on what was now X. Reiner had come to a rational conclusion that the survival of democracy itself was at stake. He was not shy about reminding people of Trump’s criminal record.
But even as he was being his father’s son when it came to politics, Reiner had been having terrible problems as a father with his younger son. Nick Reiner wrote a semi-autobiographical screenplay, Being Charlie, that dramatizes his struggles with drug addiction and his parents, his father in particular. Rob directed the movie, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2015, on Nick’s 22nd birthday.
That means the family’s struggles were there for all the world to see before Trump was first elected president.
But when those troubles erupted into horror on Sunday night, Trump made it all about him. His post on Truth Social on Monday morning was among the most disgraceful things ever to blight social media.
Trump, 79, began by contending that the deaths of Rob, 78, and Michele, 68, were “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.”
Trump said all this even as some of his supporters were coming to see the unsocial truth behind his mendacious rantings on Truth Social.
And to make it all the worst of the worst, Trump had the unconscionable gall to close by saying, “May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
That gives new meaning to his claim to be the Peace President.
