Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as Donald Trump? For many people, this was a question asked and definitively answered twenty years ago, when Trump was still a real-estate vulgarian shilling his brand on Howard Stern’s radio show and agreeing with the host’s assessment that his daughter Ivanka was “a piece of ass” and describing how he could “get away with” going backstage at the Miss Universe pageant to see the contestants naked.
Or, perhaps, his character came clear a decade later, during his first run for the Presidency, when he said of John McCain, who spent more than five years being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” This was from a man who avoided the war with 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 office from Fred Trump, Donald’s father. One of the late doctor’s daughters told the Times, “I know it was a favor.”
One day, a historian will win a contract to assemble the collected quotations of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh President—all the press-room rants, the Oval Office put-downs, the 3 A.M. Truth Social fever dreams. The early chapters will include: “Blood coming out of her—wherever.” “Horseface.” “Fat pig.” “Suckers.” “Losers.” “Enemies of the people.” “Pocahontas.” And then the volume will move on to “Piggy.” “Things happen.” And so on.
After a decade of constant presence on the political stage, Trump no longer seems capable of shocking anyone with the brutality of his language or the heedlessness of his behavior. His supporters continue to excuse his insouciant cruelty as “Trump being Trump,” proof of his authenticity. (The antisemitism of Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and a gaggle of group-chatting young Republican leaders 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 dodge the subject. What’s the point? And yet the President really did seem to break through to a new level of degradation this week.
This past weekend brought a terrible and rapid succession of violent events. On Saturday afternoon, in Providence, an unidentified gunman on the Brown University campus shot and killed two students and wounded nine others in the midst of exam period. The killer has yet to be found. On Sunday, in Archer Park, near Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, a father-and-son team, both dressed in black and heavily armed, reportedly took aim at a crowd of Jewish men, women, and children who were 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. The massacre was the latest in a long series of antisemitic incidents in Australia—and beyond.
Finally, on Sunday night, came the news that the 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, the thirty-two-year-old Nick Reiner. According to press reports, the investigation had focussed on him immediately not only because of his history of drug abuse but also because he had been behaving erratically the night before, in his parents’ presence, at a holiday party at the home of Conan O’Brien. Nick Reiner is being held, without bail, in Los Angeles County jail.
There was something about these three events that came in such rapid succession that it savaged the spirit—the yet-again regularity of American mass shootings, this time in Providence; the stark Jew hatred behind the slaughter in Australia; the sheer sadness of losing such a beloved and decent figure in the popular culture, and his wife, purportedly at the hands of their troubled son. It would be naïve to think that any leader, any clergy, could ease all that 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 on the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that kind of moral eloquence is somehow beyond our contemporary imaginations and expectations. What you would not expect is for a President of the United States to make matters even worse than they were. But, of course, he did. A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood,” Trump wrote, on Truth Social, on Monday. He went on:
David Remnick
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