Rob Reiner and his wife’s sad, horrific death at (allegedly) the hands of their son is terrible enough, but Trump had to jump in and make it worse by shitting on Reiner. As a number of people have pointed out on BlueSky, it’s hard to find any Republican who’s standing up for Trump on this one. That’s not surprising — most of Reiner’s movies were fairly standard uncontroversial Hollywood productions, plus he was clearly a nice guy. Yeah, he was a liberal, but it’s hard for any normal person to hate the guy.
Even though it’s hard to find Republicans standing up for Trump, it’s not like they’re running to the microphones to condemn him. They’re doing the standard Speaker Mike reaction: quietly running away from anything that Trump says that is fucking nuts.
So we have two kinds of Republicans:
Pure MAGA, happy that Trump shit on a liberal, nice guy or not.
Along for the ride, unhappy that Trump shit on Reiner, but too afraid of Trump to do or say anything about it.
Clearly, both of these types of Republicans suck, but I think I hate the second bunch more. They’re just a bunch of cowards. As politicians, they’re the ones who value staying in office more than they value doing what they know is the right thing. As voters, all they care about is lower taxes.
What’s really irritating is the the voters in the second group will probably tell you that they didn’t like what Trump said and felt that Reiner made a lot of good movies. But they’ll vote for Trump for a third term if they get the chance. They’re also the ones who will pretend to be persuadable whenever they’re polled, leading Democrats who listen to shitty consultants to believe they’re gettable. They’re not gettable, and the Democrats’ efforts to get them just alienate base voters.
