Trump's Response to Reiner's Death Shows the Cruelty at the Core of His Politics

Trump’s Response to Reiner’s Death Shows the Cruelty at the Core of His Politics
by Henry Giroux | December 19, 2025 - 5:50am

— from Truthout

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Trump’s response exposes the ugliness at the core of his personality and politics. Two people were murdered, a family was shattered, and yet he responds not with gravity, restraint, or even the pretense of compassion, but instead with gleeful malice, attacking Reiner for the unforgivable crime of refusing to affirm Trump’s corrupt, reactionary, white supremacist worldview — even insinuating that Reiner’s political beliefs may have caused Reiner’s death. This is not simply self-absorption run amok; it is the moral signature of a political culture in which cruelty is normalized, public life is stripped of ethical considerations, and suffering becomes raw material for spectacle and punishment. This is not an aberrant outburst or a momentary lapse. It is the logic of a political identity shaped by ethical tranquilization, hatred, authoritarianism, and a culture that treats cruelty as a form of power.

More broadly, Trump’s conversion of Reiner’s death into an occasion for political opportunism, at a moment that demands humility and collective grief, exposes a deeper rot at work, one that reflects a culture steeped in cruelty, organized indifference, and the collapse of social responsibility. Unable to acknowledge suffering beyond his own ego, he turns public life into a theater of dehumanization and punishment, targeting critics for their refusal to submit to his authoritarian imagination. Trump is the hypertrophied expression of a political culture driven by gangster capitalism, racism, and racial cleansing, a culture in which conscience has collapsed, democracy has been hollowed out, and cruelty has been normalized as a mode of power. In such a culture, death is no longer sacred, mourning is no longer collective, and public language itself becomes a weapon. We live at a time when cruelty is transformed into performance, and politics becomes a more direct extension of violence.

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As New Yorker editor David Remnick observes, such moments force an unsettling reckoning. “And so it is worth asking,” Remnick writes, “do you know anyone quite as malevolent? At your place of work? On your campus? A colleague? A teacher? Much less someone whose impulses and furies in no small measure dictate the direction, fate, and temper of the country? Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as Donald Trump?”Remnick’s questions do not merely condemn a man; they indict a political culture willing to place such a figure at its center, normalizing indecency, rewarding cruelty, and treating moral collapse as a form of strength.

There is more than ugliness and cruelty at work in Trump’s response to the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner. What is also on display is what Hannah Arendt famously called the banality of evil, a corrosive thoughtlessness that she believed lay at the heart of the making of the fascist subject and totalitarian regimes and the violence they enacted, up to and including genocidal actions. Trump’s comments do not emerge in a vacuum. They resonate with, and reinforce, a culture that traffics in dehumanization while portraying critics and dissidents as dangerous enemies of the state.

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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/henry-giroux/115731/trump-s-response-to-reiner-s-death-shows-the-cruelty-at-the-core-of-his-politics