Have you ever met someone as miserable as Donald Trump in your life? For many people, it was a question asked and definitively answered twenty years ago, when Trump was still a real estate vulgarian who sold his brand on Howard Stern’s radio show and agreed with the host’s assessment that his daughter Ivanka was “an asshole” and described how he could “get away with it” by going backstage at the Miss Universe pageant to see the contestants naked.
Or, perhaps, his character showed itself a decade later, during his first campaign for president, when he said of John McCain, who spent more than five years tortured in a North Vietnamese prison: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” This was a man who avoided war thanks to four student deferments and a medical deferment for bone spurs in his heel. Larry Braunstein, a podiatrist in Jamaica, Queens, who provided Trump with this timely diagnosis in the fall of 1968, rented his practice to Fred Trump, Donald’s father. One of the late doctor’s daughters told Times, “I know it was a favor.”
One day a historian will win a contract to compile the collected quotes from the forty-fifth and forty-seventh presidents: all the ramblings from the press room, the put-downs from the Oval Office, the 3 AM Truth Social fever dreams. The first chapters will include: “Blood coming out of her, anywhere.” “Horse face.” “Big pig.” “Assholes.” “Losers”. “Enemies of the people. » “Pocahontas.” And then the volume will change to “Piggy”. “Things happen.” And so on.
After a decade of constant presence on the political scene, Trump no longer seems capable of shocking anyone with the brutality of his language or the recklessness of his behavior. His supporters continue to excuse his reckless cruelty by saying “Trump is Trump,” proof of his authenticity. (The anti-Semitism of Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and a group of young Republican leaders in group discussion is similarly included in the “big tent” of MAGA rhetoric.) Now, when a friend begins a conversation with “Did you hear what Trump said today?” ”, you do your best to avoid the subject. What is it for? And yet the president actually seems to have reached a new level of degradation this week.
Last weekend was marked by a rapid and terrible succession of violent events. Saturday afternoon in Providence, an unidentified shooter on the campus of Brown University shot and killed two students and injured nine others during the middle of exam period. The killer has not yet been found. On Sunday at Archer Park near Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, a father-son team, both dressed in black and heavily armed, allegedly targeted a crowd of Jewish men, women and children celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. At least fifteen people were killed, including an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor and a ten-year-old girl. This massacre was the latest in a long series of anti-Semitic incidents in Australia and beyond.
Finally, on Sunday evening, it was learned that actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had been found dead in their home. Their bodies were discovered by their daughter Romy. Los Angeles police arrested their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner. According to press reports, the investigation immediately focused on him, not only because of his history of drug abuse, but also because he had behaved erratically the previous evening, in the presence of his parents, at a party at Conan O’Brien’s house. Nick Reiner is being held without bail in the Los Angeles County Jail.
There was something about these three events that happened in such rapid succession that they ravaged the mind: the regularity of mass shootings in the United States, this time in Providence; the deep hatred of Jews behind the massacre in Australia; the sheer sadness of losing such a beloved and decent figure in popular culture, along with his wife, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son. It would be naive to think that any leader, any clergy, could relieve all this pain with a gesture or a speech. Barack Obama speaking and singing “Amazing Grace” from the pulpit in Charleston, South Carolina, or Robert F. Kennedy speaking in Indianapolis the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated – this kind of moral eloquence is somehow beyond our contemporary imagination and expectations. What you wouldn’t expect is for a President of the United States to make the situation even worse than it was. But of course he did. “A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social. He continued:
