U.S. President Donald Trump attends a Mexican Border Defense Medal presentation in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., December 15, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The awful feelings from this week’s mass shootings and the twin murders of Rob and Michele Reiner come in waves.
The feelings mix despair and frustration for a society that accepts that violence — even loss of life— as an acceptable trade-off for ideological alignment and personal anger. It happens that our family is from Providence and we both and a daughter attended Brown, so the television images were unusually familiar. Bondi Beach may be a half world away, but attacks on Jews are not new for us. And like many, we’ve held Reiner in a certain shared respect for his work in film and politics.
Unfortunately, these shootings not so different from violence a year ago on the campus of Florida State University, where our daughter teaches in the dance faculty. The Australian antisemitism matches attacks on a Pittsburgh synagogue and calls of hate in the streets and on the internet.
The frustration is that unending mass killings don’t prompt successful gun limitations, that despite thoughts and prayers, we refuse to shun hate and its carriers. Indeed, I had not planned to write about these incidents which we are following closely because the shared revulsion is widespread.
What changed were remarks by Donald Trump, who posted that the Reiners’ deaths were “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.”
No Empathy for Non-Loyalists
Somehow this egocentric autocrat whom we have chosen to be the most powerful man in the country is showing us that for him, only those who agree with his politics, who accept his leadership as flawless, are worthy of his otherwise empty powers of empathy.
Even as Republicans have started speaking out to say Trump’s remarks were both inhumane and cruel, Trump doubled down to add that he did not like Reiner’s politics. For that matter, Trump isn’t exactly in love with universities, including Brown. Nor, despite his protestations about antisemitism, Trump’s support for White, Christian nationalism has been a source of serious discomfort for Jews.
There is plenty of derangement syndrome to go around. It turns out that it is Trump who is deranged.
Who besides Trump can’t find empathy for a couple apparently stabbed to death by their own son, as Los Angeles officials have alleged? How devoid of recognizably human feelings is Trump?
How have we so walked away from “character” and “morality” in leadership to normalize Trump’s public behaviors?
If this is how Trump acts in a situation that just requires a moment of basic human solemnity, why should anyone be surprised about ordering the killing of shipwrecked smuggling survivors, or wrenching children from deportable migrant parents, or insisting that it’s perfectly fine to double and triple health insurance costs?
Students ought to be able to expect to attend classes without fear of mass killers. People should expect to celebrate religious and ethnic rites without worry about snipers. Parents ought not expect to be stabbed to death by their children.
How is this Trump, scion of cruelty, a “leader” worth our respect, even apart from any of his policies?
