Trump Hits New Low In His Post On The Reiners
The solipsist-in-chief resembles Shakespeare's Claudius in his treachery
Two students at Brown University were murdered on Saturday, and many others were injured in the shooting.
Fifteen people were assassinated, and others remain injured, after a mass shooting at a Chanukah celebration in Sydney, Australia.
And two beautiful souls were tragically killed in Brentwood on the Westside of Los Angeles on Sunday.
Those two beautiful souls were film director Rob Reiner, a beloved figure in our country, and his wife, Michele, a photographer, who met her husband on the set of When Harry Met Sally, a lovely romantic comedy that he directed.
The Reiners were found dead in their home on Sunday afternoon.
We have far too much violence in our world and far too much in our country.
And we have a leader, who, at the beginning of his first run for the presidency, famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and still not lose any votes.
As I have written before, nearly everything that Trump says, does or thinks exudes violence.
He is doing the devil’s work here in our country and in the world.
While he is not to blame for every shooting or stabbing, he bears some responsibility for the toxic atmosphere right now in the United States, one that has led many angry young men and older men to believe that they have an advocate, who gives them cover for their anger, hatred, racism, xenophobia and violence.
In my last post, published on Dec. 13, I discussed the movie Chinatown as a metaphor for the confusion and cynicism of the Watergate era.
Many Americans at that time may have identified with Jake Gittes, Jack Nicholson’s private eye in that film, in feeling hopeless about the future of our country.
But we did get through Watergate.
And we will get through the Trump era, too.
In that Dec. 13 piece, “Is It Chinatown, Or Curtains, For The Movies,” I outlined many of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, such as his extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and his raids and deportations of U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike.
In addition to denying so many people due process and bombing their boats, Trump has been conspicuously corrupt in committing graft.
And his conflicts of interest extend to the entertainment and media world, where Rob Reiner was a star for decades.
In saying that “I’ll be involved” in the Netflix merger with Warner Brothers Discovery, Trump more than hinted that he would try to sabotage a deal that was approved by the boards of both companies.
Trump intends to interfere, so that Paramount, owned by the Trump-friendly Ellisons, which made a hostile takeover bid, can assume editorial control over CNN and turn it into Trump TV, which, as I wrote in my last piece, would become a Russian state TV station.
As I argued in my last piece, Trump should be impeached for a third time.
Except this time he has to be convicted of impeachment.
Republicans need to show the courage of John McCain, the patriotism of Barry Goldwater, who told Nixon that he would be convicted of impeachment if he did not resign, the honor of Lowell Weicker and Howard Baker, who served nobly on the Watergate committee, and the vision of Ronald Reagan, a hero to so many of us, who may have done more than any president other than Harry Truman in winning the Cold War.
Yes, all of the Republicans I named were heroes.
We need that kind of patriotism now from the GOP.
Isn’t it clear to everyone that Trump has for years been operating at the behest of Putin?
Doesn’t the recent national security document, with its abdication of American power, make it clear that Trump is Putin’s puppet?
How can anyone defend the all-too-obvious treachery of our disgraced chief executive?
And how can anyone speak up on behalf of a man, whose recent screed about Rob and Michele Reiner had to be among the most evil and disgusting posts in Trump’s long history of ugly rants?
With all the violence in this country, as well as the degradation of our language, I could not help but think of Hamlet.
It is my favorite play, one that will always be relevant in every age.
And it is a tribute to the genius of William Shakespeare that there are some people who have sympathy for Claudius, the lead villain in Hamlet.
Claudius is a despicable character, oozing with treachery.
He murders the king, who also happens to be his brother. And Claudius murders him by pouring poison into the king’s ear.
Donald Trump has also poisoned the ear, not of Denmark, but of America.
He has subjected us to noise, to evil that is severely damaging the ear of our nation, which is another way of saying that he has savaged our political discourse, indeed our language itself with his cruelty, his lies, his hypocrisy and his treachery.
It is very painful to read the recent social media post by the solipsist-in-chief, a post about Rob Reiner, the brilliant director, and Michele Reiner, his wife, both of whom passed away tragically on Sunday.
After reading Trump’s hideous post, I will not focus in this case on his solipsism, his constant references to himself.
No, I have discussed this trait of his at length, for roughly a decade, just as I have discussed his illiteracy quite a bit over the years.
One might read a sample of my pieces, many from 2015 and 2016 for the HuffPost, columns such as “Trumpty Dumpty Will Have His Great Fall,” “Trumplestiltskin Is A Shame,” “Standing Up For Hillary Clinton And Against the Medically Deferred Chickenhawk,” “Donald Trump Is a Disgrace, But He Is Not Mentally Ill,” and “Exit, Trump, Pursued by a Bear,” to get a sense of how I have long felt about the most evil and incompetent person that we have ever had on the national stage in our country.
I don’t usually use superlatives in my writing, but I am very comfortable using them the way I just did in describing the solipsist-in-chief.
In this column, though, I would like to focus on Trump’s treachery.
Yes, I have called Trump a traitor before.
We all know that he betrayed our nation on January 6, 2021.
But this is nothing unusual for Trump, who betrays our nation every day.
As I wrote long ago, it is clear to me, as it has been for years, that Putin has kompromat on Trump, who has sold out not only the Ukrainians but also our own country.
Witness the recent national security document that calls for our withdrawal from the world stage in a so-called Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
Yes, Trump has sold us out.
And he bears a resemblance to Claudius not only in terms of his treachery but also in terms of his language.
When Claudius, who has murdered King Hamlet, delivers his opening speech in the play, he does so with a litany of near oxymorons.
“With mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage,” says Claudius, who gives away his insincerity with this oxymoronic display, which continues when he refers, for instance, to Gertrude as “our sometime sister, now our queen.”
Even a villain in Shakespeare speaks with a degree of eloquence.
Not so, Trump.
Still, he almost matches Claudius in his oxymoronic display, when Trump writes of Rob Reiner, “a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star.”
As I have pointed out previously in a number of pieces, Trump, who once said that he has “the best words,” has no irony detector.
Indeed, earlier this year in a June post, “Zohran Mamdani Wins Our Hearts,” I noted that, when Trump says something, you can be sure that it falls victim to more than a little irony.
A classic example occurs in his recent social media post about the Reiners.
Trump’s post is so mangled and skewed with hatred and cruelty, so tasteless and full of hubris, that he reveals what has always been clear, what has always in fact been patently obvious, that Trump cannot bear the truth that other people are gifted and loving, whereas he is an abject failure.
We all fail in life, but most of us try to delve deeply into our souls when we do fail. We try to recognize what it is that we are doing wrong, and we try to change our lives and our careers so that we can improve ourselves spiritually.
Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan epitomize this kind of spiritual growth, as I have written before, most notably in my 2019 piece for Thrive Global, “Violence Is Not An Option,” a piece that followed a series of mass shootings by angry, young men.
As I wrote at the time, both Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan failed when they were young, as we all have.
They then reconfigured their lives, improved their attitudes and their games, and ended up benefiting so many of us with their hard work and ingenuity.
Trump, by contrast, has never moved beyond his abject failures in life, his penchant for violence, his lack of impulse control, his inadequacies as a student.
He has never stopped lying, cheating and stealing.
But he has never fooled some of us.
Some of us have always seen through him, and we can hear his hatred, his cruelty, his insincerity, his hubris and his treachery in his language, such as his social media post about the Reiners.
In his very language, in his pathetic rants, Trump evidences just how “tortured and struggling” he is.
Rex Tillerson did not call Trump an oxymoron, but he used a word that was quite similar.
Yes, no prefix is needed.
Of course, what is most important for our discussion is that Trump is a traitor to our country, and he reveals his treachery, as Claudius does, in his language.
Let me just point out that there have been productions of Hamlet where Fortinbras, the king of Norway, arrives and assassinates Horatio off-stage.
Norway is a great country, a democracy and an ally in NATO.
But in the play, Norway is a rival to Denmark, perhaps even a mortal enemy.
Fortinbras Putin is just looking for a chance to take over our country.
He has the Muscovite oxymoron in Trump operating at his behest.
We must beware of what could come next.
But that should not stop us from impeaching and convicting Trump for his treachery.
He has poisoned the ear of our nation. And we must eradicate his roots from our garden.