U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the announcement of new fuel economy standards, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., December 3, 2025. REUTERSBrian Snyder
I couldn’t sleep last night because I kept thinking about Trump’s response to the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner. Something about it kept worrying me.
As you may recall, instead of extending his sympathies, he said in a post to Truth Social Monday morning that:
“Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace.”
Many commentators and politicians (including several Republicans) have criticized Trump for this.
Sage Steele, former ESPN host and Trump ally, called Trump’s post “disappointing.” Rep. Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, wrote that “regardless of how you feel about Rob Reiner this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered.” Rep. Michael Lawler, Republican of New York, said “this statement is wrong.”
Jenna Ellis, Trump’s former lawyer who’s now a conservative radio host, wrote that “this is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said: “We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.”
All true, but Trump says inappropriate things all the time, and most of us know by now that he’s a loathsome human being.
Stephens went on to charge that Trump had debased America:
“In every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized.”
Of course Trump is debasing America. But we already knew this, too.
What kept me up last night was something else.
I’ve worked for three presidents, one Republican and two Democrats. I’ve seen presidents up close. The job is overwhelmingly difficult. It takes a toll. But I have never seen anything remotely like what has happened to Donald Trump.
If Trump was once rational, he no longer is.
His response to the Reiner killings, like his AI post on October 18 in which he defecated on millions of protesters, reveals a depth of paranoia and grandiosity worse than anything he has shown before.
His chief of staff, Suzy Wiles, told Chris Whipple in an interview that appeared in Tuesday’s Vanity Fair that Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality” because he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Nothing he can’t do?
I don’t want to alarm you, and I hesitate to even mention this, but I couldn’t sleep knowing that Trump has the power to launch a nuclear bomb.
As commander-in-chief, he is the only person in the United States with the authority to launch a nuke. No one else need be consulted before he does. No one else can veto such an order. Not even the vice president or secretary of defense has the power to stop it.
I hope to god he doesn’t. I don’t think he would.
But what if he’s provoked? What if he feels that his manhood or his authority or his status is being threatened? What if he just wants to demonstrate to Americans and the world how strong he is?
Again, I doubt this will happen, but the risk is not zero. Here’s a man who thinks Rob and Michele Reiner were murdered because they had a “raging obsession” with him. A man who, according to his current chief of staff, has the personality of an alcoholic with delusions of omnipotence.
It’s a risk that neither the United States nor the rest of the world can afford to take.
I don’t think I’m being alarmist. If anything, I worry that we’ve become so inured to Trump’s madness that we’re not alarmist enough.
Trump must be removed from office as soon as possible.
Either Section 4 of the 25th Amendment must be invoked — because he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” — or he must be impeached and convicted under Section 4 of Article II of the Constitution for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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