Yesterday, the President of the United States doubled down on his dismissive remarks about the late Rob Reiner, not because of policy or principle, but because Reiner dared to dislike him.
His comments remind us that while this era is bewildering, it’s also become eerily predictable. The president has assumed cultural power by openly rejecting the old rulebook, a code of “polite civic discourse” that often masked its own marginalizations, whether by downplaying bigotry or caricaturing the White working class. Trump’s political theater is not just a break from that code but a grotesque inversion of it: vulgar, vengeful, and viral.
His attack on Rob Reiner’s memory wasn’t merely cruel. It was mythmaking. The Trump White House continues to market a narrative that holds power only if two things remain true in the broader miasma of American thought: first, that politicians and D.C. operatives are inherently sneaky and corrupt, hiding behind a theater of innocence; and second, that Trump alone was targeted for exposing the rot that everyone else learned to profit from.
Whether one believes this myth or not is beside the point. Its emotional logic is potent: Trump suffers so his followers don’t have to question their suffering. He is both victim and punisher, grievance and gladiator. At this point, it’s less about Trump the man and more about Trump the myth: a living avatar of political entropy.
Thus, the lowness we’ve become accustomed to isn’t an aberration; it’s a feature of a political consensus that predates Trump but was too often sanitized in the language of bipartisan civility. That old consensus was quick to marginalize dissent, uphold donor-class orthodoxy, and wrap empire in the gauze of decency. Trump tore the gauze off and dared America to look away.
And many have. Because outrage fatigue is real. Because memory is short. Because the spectacle always offers something new to gasp at.
It’s a shame that we are in this state of the union. But the shame isn’t just that we’re here, it’s that so many have made peace with it.
Will This Matter?
The president’s comments have garnered bipartisan criticism from both Democrats and Republicans. This will likely trigger the usual scramble by political communicators to win the news cycle: with loyalists downplaying the controversy while attacking GOP defectors, and anti-Trump commentators declaring a moral breakthrough that may or may not materialize.
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