Initially, I was only going to post the above without any further commentary, since Trump’s vile, debased and inexcusable comments speak for themselves. However, I read a piece by Bruce Arthur this morning that offers some pungent observations about the nature of the man who posted them, and what he has unleashed.

… we live in a world dominated to an unreasonable degree by Donald Trump, and the American president’s reaction was vile, even for him.

Trump blamed Reiner for his horrendous, awful death, and in fact painted the murderer as a Trump supporter, because Reiner didn’t like Trump. Like so much of Trump — going way back, decades, in a way that we have both normalized and memory-holed — it’s just sick, wretched, and repellent on a human level. It’s a celestial level of narcissism, and another implicit call to political violence.

And it’s another clarifying moment in our age of moral collapse. The American right — and some Canadians, too — were zealotic after the assassination of Charlie Kirk; hundreds of Americans were fired for their commentary after his death, and both media figures and politicians vowed revenge, and to suppress rights.

It was transparently partisan. More and more, the modern right revels in inhumanity, and the incentive systems have been set up to reward dehumanization in almost every way possible, with AI as gasoline on that fire. As Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told The New Yorker earlier this year, “We thought we were creating a more civilized, more solidarity-based, more humane society. The result is worse. It’s as if there is a lamp, and when you open the lid the evil people come out.” 

Trump is getting worse — one is reminded of the diminished inhibition of some dementia patients as the disease takes hold — but the information system is so thoroughly polluted that it probably sinks beneath the waves. What is clear is Rob Reiner stood for a gentle, honest, and principled version of humanity — when Charlie Kirk died, for instance, he expressed genuine horror and sympathy. In his art, he reflected that humanity. In his life, too.

Trump is like a demon, possessing the soul of America and giving license to its worst parts. And that’s all I have to say.