Even within the White House, chatter is growing that Donald Trump may be losing it, after the president shared a jaw-dropping response to Rob Reiner’s murder, according to author Michael Wolff.
Trump faced condemnation across the political spectrum Monday for appearing to mock the beloved director, 78, and his wife, 68, and saying their deaths were due to an “affliction” with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
The 79-year-old president’s unhinged post has apparently unsettled even loyalists in the White House.
Wolff shared on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that he had spoken to someone in the White House who told him, “I don’t know what that was, but it wasn’t good. Everybody knows it’s a thin line he walks. Is he teetering? Well...”
“This person didn’t complete the sentence,” Wolff said.
Co-host Joanna Coles chimed in, “Well, I wouldn’t say it was teetering, I would say it’s fallen off the line.”
Wolff added, “It is not just that this is objectionable, but the fact that someone would say this is an indication of their own alarming personal situation.”
The Trump biographer argued that the president’s post would be nothing but “devastating” to the increasingly unpopular president—even if no one in the administration is willing to publicly call him out—noting that Reiner was “a beloved American” and that grief is universally understood.
“We all become kind of diagnosticians of these old-man presidents. I mean, nobody is going to come out and say, ‘He’s losing it.’ So we all have to make our own judgments about that,” Wolff said.
“And I think in this situation, particularly in this situation—in the way that everyone who has a family at some level relates to this—I think the judgment is going to be a devastating one: Trump is off his f---ing rocker.”
In his Truth Social post, Trump claimed that Reiner was a “tortured and struggling” director who was killed due to the “anger he caused others” through his “affliction” with “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a phrase often used by Trump and his supporters to dismiss criticism of him as irrational.
“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...” the president wrote. He later doubled down on his heartless comments when asked about them in the Oval Office.
Wolff noted that Reiner’s death had “nothing to do with Donald Trump” until the president felt the need to “insert himself into the situation.”
Reiner’s troubled son, Nick Reiner, 32, is suspected of killing his parents. Prosecutors announced Tuesday that he will be charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
Coles remarked that Trump’s post “really does sound like the utterings from an elderly relative who you go and see reluctantly in a home because they just say vile things now.”
“All inhibition has gone and they are left muttering in the corner, and you see them out of obligation. And yet, of course, he’s the president of the United States, which is truly alarming,” she said.
Coles, the Daily Beast’s chief content officer, argued, “It’s not the first time he’s shown signs of losing it,” noting that Trump has drawn increased scrutiny to his cognitive health and physical fitness in recent weeks by repeatedly dozing off at official meetings.
Wolff said that while sleeping on the job may amount to being “not a good look,” Trump’s “merciless disparagement” of Reiner just a few hours after the director’s death was entirely unnecessary and “self-destructive.”
“To have dived in and so proactively done something that will create a hundred percent of ill will—that’s derangement,” he said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung has previously called Wolff “a lying sack of s—t” who “has been proven to be a fraud.”
“He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” he previously told the Beast.
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