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Hollywood lost two lives in a brutal and shocking way this week when Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were found dead in their Los Angeles home and their son was arrested in connection with the killings. Americans of every political stripe should first and foremost grieve for the victims and their family and let law enforcement do its work to determine what happened.
President Trump responded on his platform by attacking Mr. Reiner’s long record of public hostility toward him, calling the director “tortured and struggling” and invoking the term Trump Derangement Syndrome as an explanation for the tragedy — a claim he offered without evidence. That blunt, unforgiving style is exactly what his critics hate and what his supporters have come to expect, but it also turned a private family calamity into a partisan spectacle overnight.
Even some Republicans publicly pushed back, with lawmakers like Representative Thomas Massie and others calling the remarks inappropriate and urging a more respectful tone toward a man who had just been killed. Conservatives should not reflexively circle the wagons every time the president speaks too sharply; honor and decency require we speak up when a line is crossed, and principled Republicans did just that.
That said, the wider outrage machine must be called out for its performative nature. For years, conservative voices have seen personal attacks, threats, and worse normalized by the same cultural institutions that now demand sanctimony; if the left’s leaders treated conservative losses with the same decency they demand from others, maybe the bar for public discourse would be higher across the board.
We also need to be clear-eyed about the facts: investigators have not presented any evidence tying the Reiners’ politics to their deaths, and the suspect has been arrested and is awaiting prosecution. Americans must resist the rush to politicize every tragedy until the facts are known, and politicians should not opportunistically weaponize grief for cheap rhetorical points.
The episode matters politically because it exposes two things at once: the media’s hunger to inflate and exploit outrage, and the rawness of our national conversation after years of mutual demonization. Conservatives should demand both accountability for reckless rhetoric and consistency from our opponents — the left’s cultural captains should be held to the same standard of decency they expect from conservatives.
In the end, hardworking Americans want leaders who protect the rule of law, mourn losses with dignity, and focus on the pressing issues that affect families — taxes, jobs, security, and safety. Let the investigators finish their work, let the legal system run its course, and let our politics return to service instead of spectacle.
