Despite his habit of accusing his critics of the disorder, the "most extreme victim" of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is Donald Trump himself, according to an analysis from The Daily Beast, with his recent comments about filmmaker Rob Reiner being the latest proof.
On Sunday evening, Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found stabbed to death in the Los Angeles home, with their son, Nick Reiner, later being charged in connection with their deaths. The next morning, Trump set off an avalanche of controversy with a post to Truth Social about Reiner's passing, in which he claimed that the filmmaker's death was the result of "Trump Derangement Syndrome," a label he commonly lobs at his outspoken critics.
Writing in an opinion column for The Daily Beast, Michael Daly argued that Trump himself was the most acute case of his own so-called syndrome, with Reiner's history of "truth-telling" and Trump's own ingrained narcissism being the primary factors behind his "derangement."
Daly's argument tracks numerous comments Reiner made about Trump over the years, including about the first time he encountered the future president at an Atlantic City boxing match in 1988 alongside actor and collaborator Billy Crystal.
“We just met him prior to the fight,” Reiner said in a 2017 interview with Politico. "We talked with him for a while... I have worked with people who have the biggest egos in the world, you know, actors. They have huge egos, and, you know, politicians have egos too. You wouldn’t go into that profession, whether it’s an actor or a politician, unless you had a need to be liked."
"I’ve never met somebody with as big an ego. I couldn’t believe it,” Reiner continued. “He’s meeting Billy… He’s meeting me, and yet it’s only about him. And so I thought, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ Everything that we talked about came back to him. It always came back to him... Doesn’t matter what we talked about, [it] came right back to him."
Reiner also relayed a story about an odd, coincidental connection between Trump and his family: his wife, Michele, a professional photographer, took the cover photo for Trump's famed 1987 book, The Art of the Deal.
Daly also highlighted a series of X posts Reiner made in the weeks and months following Trump's second inauguration.
"Our founding fathers never imagined that the United States would be run by a convicted felon," Reiner posted in February. "And the compels me to add whatever resistance I can to try and correct that."
Two days later, he added in another post, "The convicted felon president can continue to lie to his followers, but when the starts to affect their lives, they will abandon him."
That second post has proven somewhat prophetic, as polls continue to show Trump's support from his own voters slipping as they grow frustrated with his handling of the economy.