Editorial: Trump's vile words prove Reiner was right

Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, South Florida Sun Sentinel on Dec 23, 2025

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There’s not enough time or space to react to every Donald Trump rant that’s so offensive coming from a president of the United States.

What he said about the Reiner murders demands discussion — and not just because it was so vile. It confirms much of what’s deplorable in Trump.

Without waiting to hear who might have killed Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, Trump declared that the murders were to avenge what the liberal film director said about him.

Reiner and his wife died, Trump said on Truth Social, “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.”

Trump exploited a family tragedy to make it all about him. The one with a mind-crippling disease here isn’t Rob Reiner.

Yes, Trump Derangement Syndrome exists, but the term best fits Trump himself.

‘He is mentally unfit’

Since Trump brought it up, let’s reflect on what Rob Reiner actually said about him.

“Donald Trump is the single most unqualified human being to ever assume the presidency of the United States,” Reiner told Variety magazine at a film festival in Dubai in 2017. “He is mentally unfit. Not only does he not understand how government works, he has no interest in trying to find out how it works.”

“Make no mistake,” Reiner said in October. “We have a year before becoming a full-on autocracy and democracy completely leaves us.”

Reiner’s persistent criticism was not unique. His fear of what Trump is doing to our democracy is widely shared.

No other presidents gave us reason, as Trump does almost daily, to doubt a wholehearted commitment to our fundamental values as a society.

Trump’s ruthless demand for out-of-cycle partisan gerrymandering that might preserve his party’s congressional majority — and his power — is anti-democratic in the extreme. It is heartwarming that many truly conservative Republicans, in Indiana, New Hampshire, Kansas and Nebraska, refuse to compromise their consciences for his sake. It’s tragic that more members of Congress don’t also stand up to him.

Contempt for democracy

It’s not just what Trump does but what he says that betrays his contempt for democracy.

The word “democracy” appears only three times in the 29 mostly self-congratulatory pages of the National Security Strategy document he issued last month.

And those three references are not reassuring.

Government powers, Trump writes, must never be abused, whether under the guise of “‘deradicalization,’ ‘protecting our democracy’ or any other pretext.”

Democracy is a pretext now?

Some European governments are trampling on “basic principles of democracy,” he claims, “to suppress opposition.” American diplomacy, he asserts, should “continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history” (italics added).

There’s the gist. At other places, he refers to Europe’s “civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” and refers favorably to “the growing influence of patriotic European parties.”

Exulting over extremism

By that, he means white racism and the right-wing parties, some of them neo-fascist, that are flourishing in Europe, particularly the Alternative for Germany (AfD) that his vice president has openly promoted.

Domestically, Trump reveals the depth of his hatred for immigrants as he speaks of “the cynical manipulation of our immigration system to build up voting blocs loyal to foreign interests within our country.”

That openly evokes the far right’s “great replacement theory,” which is racist throughout.

Overall, the document pays no respect to democracy as our nation’s guiding policy and mission in the world. Instead, it extols U.S. dominance in commerce and sees the world, as a New York Times op-ed put it, “as a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.”

The strategy document was an unmistakable warning to Europe to be responsible for its own security. That has not gone unnoticed over there.

‘The business of America’

The business of America is no longer making the world safe for democracy. With Trump, the business of America is business, a phrase often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge.

That was in 1925, four years before economic disaster revealed the perils of a profit-at-any-price mindset.

The current systematic and deliberate politicization, if not destruction, of the SEC, the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Justice Department recklessly invites another crash.

Our nation could recover from a collapsed economy. It has before. Restoring democracy? That is much harder.

It would have to start with making the White House a shrine worthy once again of the nation’s, and the world’s, respect.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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