MAGA shifts away from Trump after Reiner remarks

The killing of Charlie Kirk seems to have been a clarifying moment in modern American politics, but not in the way conservatives initially envisioned. The right’s immediate condemnations of political violence, while insisting that the left is uniquely inclined toward political violence, were clearly meant more as a cudgel than any true expressions of principle. Wrapped in performative grief, the attempts to frame Donald Trump’s MAGA movement as guardians of moral order quickly gave way to infighting. 

Now, just three months later, the president himself has completely blown up the entire premise by suggesting that the brutal killing of an American icon was karmic justice for political dissent. 

Famed Hollywood director Rob Reiner, 78, and his wife Michele, 68, were stabbed to death in their Brentwood, California, home on Sunday. Authorities have charged Reiner’s 32-year-old son, Nick, with murder, and he’s being held on $4 million bail. Hours later, Trump took to Truth Social and ranted that Reiner’s murder was the natural outcome of his political beliefs. 

“Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, 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,” Trump posted on Monday. “He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before.” 

The post was promoted by the White House on social media. 

Reiner was indeed an outspoken critic of the president. In a 2018 interview about his film “Shock and Awe” with Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, he called Trump “a con man and a criminal.” Reiner was also a longtime influential player in Democratic politics, which included co-founding an organization that played a pivotal role in the fight for marriage equality. He faulted the mainstream media for not holding the president “accountable,” asserting that “major outlets” serve as “propaganda for an American president.” In response, Reiner founded the Committee to Investigate Russia, a nonpartisan group that highlighted the Russian effort to interfere with American elections. As Breitbart pointed out, Michele Reiner photographed Trump for the original cover of his 1987 bestselling book “The Art of the Deal.”

Such a grisly family murder of a prominent cultural and political figure is the kind of tragedy that would be expected to halt partisan politics, if only for a moment. And when news of Reiner’s death broke, prominent far-right voices rushed to express sympathy. Prominent influencer and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec declared that “you won’t see people on the right celebrating” the Reiners’ murder, contrasting it with what he characterized as the left’s reaction to Kirk’s killing. It was less an expression of empathy than a preemptive alibi. 

Trump apparently didn’t get the message. What is new is not the president’s behavior, but the cracks forming around him.

Following an already gruesome weekend that saw two mass shootings, one at Brown University — the first ever at an Ivy League institution — and a terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia, Trump’s evident bloodlust prompted even MAGA loyalists to question the president. 

On X, Fox News host Kennedy called Trump’s behavior “Disgusting, unnecessary and inappropriate.” Joe Concha, one of the biggest Trump apologists on the network, said the president’s attack was “completely inappropriate.” Longtime Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz claimed on “Special Report” that Trump’s comments were “beneath him.” On “The Five,” token liberal (and former Democratic congressman) Harold Ford begged his co-hosts to condemn Trump’s comments, but they all refused. Co-host Greg Gutfeld justified Trump continuing to rage against Reiner in death, but stopped short of trying to explain how the acclaimed director’s criticism of the president led to his killing.

Beyond Fox News, podcast host Tim Pool insisted that Trump “can do better.” CNN contributor David Urban, who served as the president’s senior campaign adviser in 2016, condemned the president’s comments as “indefensible.” The influential evangelical Russell Moore, editor-at-large of Christianity Today who has not been shy about criticizing Trump, slammed him for “vile, disgusting, and immoral behavior.” Even Jenna Ellis, the president’s former lawyer who assisted him in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, called him out for setting “a horrible example” in a post on X. “This is NOT the appropriate response,” she said.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

But the backlash hasn’t bothered Trump, who doubled down on his tirade in remarks to reporters in the Oval Office. “He was a deranged person,” the president said Monday afternoon. “Trump Derangement Syndrome. So, I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way, shape or form. I thought he was very bad for our country.”

Arguing that the director “hurt himself career-wise” by criticizing him and creating work that examined Russian interference, Trump claimed, “He said, he liked, he knew it was false. In fact it’s the exact opposite, that I was a friend of Russia, controlled by Russia. You know, it was the Russia hoax. He was one of the people behind it.”

Much of MAGA followed the president’s lead and attacked the deceased.

“Looks like Rob should’ve spent more time parenting & less time spreading Russia conspiracy hoaxes about President Trump,” Laura Loomer posted on X. Finance influencer Grant Cardona was also quick to blame Reiner for his own murder: “When anger and hate are perpetuated by the father the family will be angry and hateful.” MAGA influencer Andrew Pollack, who gained fame after his daughter was killed during a mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, argued that “Trump was nearly murdered and jailed for life by leftists, he can say whatever the hell he wants about the people that encouraged it.”

An account run by the Republican National Committee falsely claimed that Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who recently announced a Senate bid, refused to condemn Kirk’s assassination. As has been their decade-long crouch, several Republicans in Congress, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, refused to even engage with reporters’ questions about Trump’s response to Reiner’s killing, while others attempted to downplay it altogether. 

This predictable behavior makes complaints, like the so-called “Democrat scandal playbook” perpetuated by Will Cain, unintentionally revealing. The Fox News host described a four-step process that supposedly explains every Democratic controversy: deny, dismiss as conspiracy, admit it’s happening and finally insist it’s actually good. 

But rather than a uniquely liberal pathology, Cain’s critique is pure projection — and Republicans running defense for Trump are executing that exact playbook in record time. Step one: Insist MAGA would never celebrate a death. Step two: Dismiss criticism of Trump as liberal hysteria. Step three: Concede that Trump said it, but insist it was righteously provoked. Step four: Argue that Reiner deserved it anyway because he criticized the president.

The core truth is this: MAGA politics is not about values. It’s about permission. As Parker Molloy, author of The Present Age Substack, comprehensively demonstrated, “The post-Kirk purge was never about mourning. It wasn’t about opposing political violence or maintaining civil discourse or respecting the dead. It was about power. It was about demonstrating that there would be consequences for insufficient loyalty, for failing to perform the correct emotions at the correct time about the correct people.”

The condemnations, then, ring hollow. We know there will be no real consequences for this depraved behavior — only continued normalization. Republicans may be less willing to excuse the inexcusable, but they are still unwilling to confront it honestly.

This is why Gavin Newsom’s trolling works so effectively. It’s not because the Democratic governor of California is particularly clever or cruel. It’s because he holds up a mirror. When he points out the contradictions and absurdities of MAGA grievance culture, he is reflecting the movement’s own tactics back at them. MAGA’s outrage is selective and their morality is conditional. 

Just days ago, conservative influencers pretended to be outraged over Newsom’s post about Elon Musk’s estranged transgender daughter. They clutched their pearls and demanded civility. Now they are forced to explain — or awkwardly ignore — the president of the United States mocking a murder victim and a sad, all-too-common family story of addiction and mental illness. This is the same movement that applauded when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to investigate staff for negative speech about Charlie Kirk, cheered when the State Department pulled visas over social media posts and supported the suspension of ABC late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. 

Now that Trump’s aura of inevitability is gone, the message discipline that made MAGA magic is waning — and yet the president himself is oblivious to this shift. Or worse, he is incapable of changing course.