Gambling in the Casino – The Dispatch

Wiles’ assessments of her colleagues are at once shocking and self-evident, a contradiction in terms that nonetheless describes a lot of the administration’s behavior. Whenever the president debuts some innovative new form of graft or indicts one of his political enemies or wonders aloud why we can’t have more Aryan immigrants, the same contradiction recurs. It’s scandalous—yet so predictable as to be banal. How outraged can one realistically be?

The contradiction recurred again yesterday when Trump posted the most gratuitously vicious screed in his long reign as the world’s most successful troll:

Reiner was indeed a passionate Trump critic, but he and his wife didn’t “pass away.” They were stabbed to death. Their troubled son Nick has been arrested and charged with their murders. To the president, an infamous crime and horrendous family tragedy was a can’t-miss opportunity to say “good riddance” to an antagonist by hinting that, as a matter of cosmic justice, Reiner got what he deserved.

Normally, he celebrates privately when death stalks one of his adversaries, but I suppose some moments of happiness are so transcendent that they simply must be shared.

Does his post about Reiner matter? How outraged can one realistically be in 2025?

“Trump’s Reiner comment broke through the normie firewall for reasons I don’t fully understand,” populist podcaster Saagar Enjeti alleged yesterday. Anecdotally, that seems true. One Dispatch colleague told me that her husband, who doesn’t follow politics online, was talking about the president’s post last night. Several people in political circles whom I follow on Twitter claimed that their normally apathetic friends were buzzing about it.

Why? Mainly, I think, because Reiner was a well-liked celebrity and his murder is major national news that transcends politics.

Every American knows on some level that the president is a lowlife—I don’t like the mean tweets, blah blah—but politics has always been populated by lowlifes of greater and lesser magnitude. When Trump rants about Somali immigrants in the manner of a Der Sturmer editorial, that gets filed by our civically desiccated public under “politics ain’t beanbag.” But when he dances a rhetorical jig on a murdered filmmaker’s grave before the body is cold?

There’s no political context that will excuse the monstrousness of that. It’s deplorable, to borrow a term, and gratuitously so. Normies knew Trump was a cretin, but the dimmest among them may be honestly surprised, even at this late date, to discover that he’s this much of one. 

The Reiner post resembles his surprise demolition of the White House’s East Wing as an unusually stark, audacious, and repellent exercise in norm-busting. If you worry about him abusing his power, watching him destroy a universally recognized piece of America’s civic architecture felt like vivid confirmation that you’re right to do so. Ditto for his social media gravedance: A man who can’t restrain his impulse to mock parents murdered by their child has something deeply, alarmingly wrong with him.

A more interesting question than why the Reiner post broke through among average Americans is why it broke through on the right, specifically. The gatekeepers of Trumpist media labor strenuously to shelter their audiences from evidence of the president’s depravity, but in this case Trump’s screed gathered enough velocity that it punctured the MAGA bubble and left many aghast.

Even Nick Fuentes denounced it. Our president, God love him, somehow found a way to shock the Nazi conscience.

Some right-wingers were sincerely mortified by Trump’s post, I’m sure, but the postliberal GOP isn’t known for moral squeamishness. The closest they’ll usually come to criticizing Trump on moral grounds is to note that other people might find the president’s behavior objectionable and that in turn might cause them to—gasp—not vote Republican. Traditionally, the only way to discourage ruthlessness while remaining true to MAGA morality, which treats ruthlessness as a supreme virtue, is to frame one’s complaint in terms of power: It’s fine in the abstract to pop the champagne over Rob Reiner’s throat being slit, perhaps, but what if it ends up costing us the House?

In this case, though, from what I saw, the usual instrumentalist critiques of Trump’s immorality were outnumbered by earnest “ugh, this is gross” takes on the right about the Reiner post. That was unexpected—although maybe it shouldn’t have been.

After all, it was just a few months ago that Republicans made a moral example of hundreds of left-wing randos who celebrated or rationalized the murder of Charlie Kirk. More than 600 people were punished professionally for it; the vice president himself encouraged right-wingers to call the employers of anyone seen reveling in schadenfreude. The Trump-era right rarely takes the moral high road, but left-wing ghoulishness over Kirk’s assassination handed MAGA a moral contrast it couldn’t resist. Progressives might celebrate murder, Trumpists insisted, but we do not.

Then Rob Reiner—who condemned Kirk’s murder forthrightly—was himself murdered and Trump couldn’t contain his glee. The president made schmucks of his own fans, not for the first time and certainly not the last.

Beyond that obvious hypocrisy, though, Enjeti is surely correct that the right-wing denunciations of Trump’s post are “a signal that his spectre of untouchability is beginning to fall apart.” What we have here, in other words, is another MAGA “death twitch,” with various stakeholders eager to exploit the public backlash to try to further loosen the president’s grip on the GOP. Go figure that the president’s two biggest populist antagonists in the House, Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, each flogged him yesterday for his callousness about Reiner. Getting Republicans to entertain the unthinkable, that ackshually Trump is a bad guy, might induce just enough queasiness among right-wingers about his continued leadership of the party to let rival authority figures gain a political foothold.

So here we are, 10 years into Trumpification, with Republicans at last shocked, shocked to find gambling going on in their casino. Better late than never?

“Better late than never” is the appropriate conclusion, I suppose. Politics is about building coalitions, and the ackshually Trump is a bad guy coalition should always welcome latecomers. Even when they’re very, very late.

But it would be nice if they acknowledged how late they are.

That the president is incapable of feeling empathy for other people and not at all ashamed of that fact should not be treated as a revelation in 2025, even if it would make right-wing defectors feel better about themselves if the rest of us agreed to do so. Lack of empathy is and has always been a “defining feature” of Trump’s leadership, as Vaughn Hillyard detailed with numerous examples at MS NOW. (Numerous, but not exhaustive: He forgot the time the president hinted that the late John McCain was in hell, for instance.)

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Elon Musk said in an interview earlier this year during his reign of error at DOGE. That’s as succinct a summary of postliberal morality as one could devise and has been an animating principle of Trumpism from the jump. I’d go as far as to say that the Trump-Musk dismantling of USAID in the early days of the administration this year should be considered MAGA’s signature achievement: It killed a lot of people, accomplished next to nothing in terms of savings, and was carried out in a manner that even Susie Wiles condemns, but it sure did make a statement about deprioritizing empathy.

When Trump, instead of offering condolences, did a virtual keg-stand on Rob Reiner’s grave, that was just him being true to the ethos of his movement. “This president cannot discern moral right and wrong through a person’s actions, like a normal human being,” Jim Geraghty wrote at National Review. “Donald Trump’s entire worldview of whether someone is a good person or a bad person depends entirely on whether that person offers praise or criticism of Trump.” That’s all true and has been self-evidently true for many years. To those who were shocked to suddenly discover it yesterday: How did you not notice all the gambling happening in your casino?

Here’s another question. What is to be done about the president’s monstrousness? What political consequences should it have?

Geraghty is also right, of course, when he says, “The guy who can’t feel empathy for the Reiners being stabbed to death by their son is also not going to feel empathy for the people who contend the cost of living is still high.” Or for Ukrainians who risk being left at Russia’s mercy if the White House pressures Kyiv into accepting a bad peace deal. Or for American citizens being harassed by ICE. The Reiner post isn’t some odd curio of how Trump behaves when he’s in a bad mood, it’s an insight into how a mind like his has governed and will govern.

What do Republicans who abhor the cruelty shown by the president to the Reiner family intend to do to protect the country from his impulses?

Most will compartmentalize, assuring themselves that Geraghty is wrong and Christopher Rufo is right: Trump’s reaction to Reiner’s murder isn’t a window onto policy but rather a “tic,” an odd little personality quirk that has no bearing on anything. Yes, okay, the president might relish seeing his enemies dead, but that’s neither here nor there. Only when some random liberal on Twitter, not the most powerful man in the world, stoops to ghoulishness is it time to worry.

Some will find the question itself mystifying. Having denounced the president’s Reiner post, why should they be expected to do anything more to oppose him? They’re willing to call “balls” and “strikes” on Trump, as any conscientious conservative should be, and in this case, they’ve called a strike. Their job is done.

To that, I’ll say what I’ve said a few times previously: Calling balls and strikes implies potentially calling the batter out. How many more strikes does the president get before halting his consolidation of power becomes an urgent national priority? What further evidence is needed that we’re being governed by an honest-to-goodness authoritarian sociopath to justify concluding that divided government in 2027 would be better for America than unified Republican control?

In my cynical heart of hearts, I suspect right-wingers clamored to flog Trump over his Reiner post not because it was so despicable, although it was, but because the political stakes were so low. If you’re disturbed by him going full Father Coughlin on Somali migrants, for instance, you’re pitting yourself directly against MAGA immigration policy and the white tribalism it serves. That’s not the sort of ruthlessness that a Republican in good standing can comfortably oppose.

But if you’re disturbed by him splashing around in the blood of beloved director Rob Reiner? Sure, vent away. Trump’s post inadvertently provided a valuable service to the non-fascists in his base, frankly, by handing them a costless opportunity to reassure themselves that they’re better people than he is while they continue reliably pulling the lever for him and his degenerate movement. 

“How this vile, disgusting, and immoral behavior has become normalized in the United States is something our descendants will study in school, to the shame of our generation,” Russell Moore tweeted yesterday of Trump’s post. I don’t believe that, but if he’s right and I’m wrong, let the studies begin with the people who postured as morally superior to the president while seeking every conceivable rationalization to continue empowering him.