Trump's Rob Reiner Tweet Technically Could Have Been Worse

Maybe we saw the cleaned-up version

The apparent murder of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner is resoundingly horrible. That would be true if even if Reiner hadn’t directed some of the funniest movies of all time, including Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride. Given the perverse rules of the universe, if Reiner had directed Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and a series of snuff films, he probably would have survived the attack and been back to work by lunch — emphatically awful people never seem to be scathed by this sort of thing. But Reiner was a talented guy loved by many people, and he and Michele will be sorely missed.

Any decent human being responded to the news with shock and horror.¹ But our president — only months removed from using government power to try to silence people whom he thought said the wrong thing after the murder of Charlie Kirk — said this:

It’s deranged for the president to write that; it’s some-word-worse-than-”deranged”-that-hasn’t-been-invented-yet for the White House to post it. Any minimally competent public relations team would keep that post from going out; when I was a speechwriter, I would have considered it my job to do anything up to and including hitting my boss in the head with a fire extinguisher to keep him from hitting “send”. And maybe Trump wrote the post and sent it before his staff knew what was happening, but the official White House “rapid response” Twitter account retweeted it, so the post had some level of institutional sign-off. And then Trump repeated the thought later in the day.

But here’s an astounding thought: Maybe the post is the end-product of Trump’s staff doing their jobs. Maybe they did edit out Trump’s most noxious words, and we saw a sanitized version of Trump’s narcissistic ramblings. Trump’s vindictiveness runs so deep that that could be true. And with a little imagination, I can picture what those early drafts were like, and even put myself in the shoes of whatever cosmically fucked staffer is in charge of massaging Trump’s words. Here are some speculative but inspired-by-real-events guesses at what those early drafts might have said.

Given how flamboyantly wrong Trump often is — he just claimed that tariffs have brought in $18 trillion revenue, which is 150 times the actual amount — this seems like a plausible first draft. Of course, Rob Reiner directed The Princess Bride and A Few Good Men, and he played “Meathead” on All in the Family. If I was advising Trump, I might say something like “it might be good to reflect on Reiner’s most popular movies.” And that would surely be a cursed-monkey’s-paw wish that would lead to this post:

For the record, I don’t believe any of those things. But Trump is a huge asshole, so he might praise actors’ performances without giving any credit to the director. Trump is the sort of dick who would fail to realize that every movie is a collaboration, there’s an interplay between the creative elements, and basically every good movie reflects a cooperation in which the team became more than the sum of their parts. Trump doesn’t get that, which is my 10,619th least-favorite thing about him.

Back to putting myself in the shoes of a Trump staffer: I might actually tell Trump to go ahead and send the message above. Because I’d be worried that Trump might write something far worse — something like this:

Did Trump write any of this? Almost certainly not…not word-for-word, anyway. But I wouldn’t be shocked if I’m in the general ballpark of some early drafts — it’s hard to underestimate Trump’s gift for being an asshole. And his ability to never suffer consequences for his obvious inhumanity might be the most inexplicable force in the universe. We don’t know what Trump wrote in private, but what he posted in public is plenty bad enough.

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1. By the way: Here’s Rob Reiner a few months ago responding to Charlie Kirk’s murder with shock and horror.