President Donald Trump on Monday held a press conference full of "preposterous" claims and statements, according to an analysis from The Bulwark's Tim Miller, including some that revealed him as "a uniquely horrendous human being."
Miller's most scathing remarks were reserved for Trump's comments about the death of Rob Reiner. Following reports Sunday evening that the legendary filmmaker and his wife had been killed in their Los Angeles home, Trump took to Truth Social with a post suggesting that his death was the result of "Trump Derangement Syndrome," prompting a massive backlash from even his most fervent supporters.
"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," Trump's post read.
At the press conference, Trump refused to back down from the comments, further claiming that Reiner had been "very bad for our country."
"Trump reveals himself once again to just be a uniquely horrendous human being, somebody who cares only about himself," Miller said in a "Bulwark Takes" video from Monday, later adding, "It's impossible to imagine another president saying this... Like, what if... the coach of your kid's team posted like that?... If the coach of my kid's soccer team posted on the internet something as deranged as Trump posted about Rob Reiner's death, I think I'd pull the kid off the team."
The press conference was primarily built around Trump's announcement of an executive order classifying fentanyl as a "weapon of mass destruction," a move Miller called "preposterous" and designed only to try and fabricate a rationale for further military action in Venezuela, despite the fact that most fentanyl enters the US from China and Mexico.
"Fentanyl deaths are down. They're still too high, but they're down," Miller said. "Trump was president already once, unfortunately. You know, there was no declaration of this nature then. So what is it about now that makes him want to do this?
"The whole thing is preposterous," he continued. "So it's kind of hard to get into their head. But I guess what you're seeing here is, again, they don't have public support for this war [with Venezuela]. They don't really have a clear rationale for it. And so they're trying to kind of build the building blocks of trying to give themselves war powers for these actions based on tenuous claims and orders... To me, they're making that claim in order to, again, create this legal rationale or justification for treating the drug cartels the same way they would treat terrorists under the 2001 [Authorization for Use of Military Force]. And this is obviously preposterous, but they are preposterous."
