When a President Weaponizes Murder

Sunday, December 14, 2025, approximately 3:40 PM: Rob Reiner (78) and Michele Singer Reiner (68) are found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home.

Sunday evening: Their son Nick Reiner (32) is arrested and charged with double homicide. The LAPD confirms a murder investigation is underway.

This morning, Monday, December 15, 2025, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social.

“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. 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!”

The post received 25,900 likes within the first hour. As of this writing there are at least 10K more.

Trump didn’t just mock a dead critic—he constructed an alternative causality while the actual murderer sat in police custody.

Consider what Trump knew when he posted: this was a confirmed homicide investigation, the suspect was Reiner’s son arrested hours earlier, the deaths resulted from stabbing in what appeared to be a domestic tragedy. Trump chose to ignore these facts and instead blame Reiner’s death on his political opposition to Trump, not metaphorically but explicitly, claiming he died “due to the anger he caused others” through his “obsession” with opposing Trump.

This is strategic messaging with clear implication: critics of Trump suffer consequences, and those consequences are their own fault. The framing does three things simultaneously—it establishes that opposition to Trump leads to suffering and death, it inverts causality so critics don’t suffer because they’re targeted but because their “derangement” causes self-destruction, and it celebrates the outcome by framing America’s “Golden Age” as arriving alongside (perhaps because of?) the critic’s death. Jack White and others condemned the statement, but over 30,500 people have already liked it. That number matters more than the condemnations because those likes aren’t passive consumption—they’re active participation in normalization, each one signaling agreement that this framing is correct, that critics deserve what they get, that their suffering merits celebration.

Some defenders frame Trump’s post as “trolling”—as if presidential cruelty performed for entertainment somehow makes it better rather than demonstrating how thoroughly we’ve normalized a sitting president weaponizing murder for political messaging. The fact that “he’s just trolling” counts as a defense proves the problem rather than refuting it.

Meanwhile, others attempt to defend it with whataboutisms, false equivalence, hasty generalizations, composition fallacy, straw men, and more deflective bullshit.

“Trump Derangement Syndrome” as an Epistemic Weapon

I’ve written before about specific extremist rhetoric patterns—replacement theory, blood and soil ideology, dehumanization of targeted groups. That analysis used academic frameworks and empirical data to document observable patterns. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” exists to prevent exactly that kind of analysis.

The term functions as thought-terminating cliché: if opposition to Trump is definitionally a mental illness, then no critique can be rational, and it creates epistemic closure where evidence becomes irrelevant because the very act of presenting evidence proves your “derangement.” Amusingly, Grok (Elon Musk’s AI) concludes the term “is not a clinical diagnosis—it’s opinion-based” and functions to “obscure patterns without rebuttal.” Even an AI owned by a Trump ally acknowledges the term is propaganda, not description.

The medical framing does specific work though—it pathologizes dissent as disease rather than engagement with evidence, provides ready-made explanation for any suffering by critics (they brought it on themselves), preemptively delegitimizes future criticism (anyone who opposes Trump is diseased by definition), and creates permission structure for ignoring or celebrating harm to critics. The mechanism is identical to Soviet psychiatry’s “sluggish schizophrenia” diagnosis for political dissidents—frame resistance as mental illness, use that framing to justify consequences.

The Reiner post demonstrates mastery of this technique. Trump doesn’t engage with anything Reiner actually said or did. He simply diagnoses him as diseased, attributes his death to that disease, and moves on to celebrating America’s “Golden Age.”

Stochastic Terrorism: How Indirect Incitement Works

Trump didn’t cause Nick Reiner to murder his parents, but Trump’s post establishes a framework where any suffering by critics can be attributed to their “Trump Derangement Syndrome” rather than to actual circumstances or perpetrators. This is how stochastic terrorism functions—rhetoric that incites violence without explicit commands by dehumanizing or delegitimizing targets, suggesting they deserve consequences, celebrating when consequences occur, and maintaining plausible deniability because the speaker never told anyone to do anything.

The statistical nature is key: the speaker doesn’t need most of the audience to act violently, just some percentage. If you reach 77 million people and 0.01% escalate, that’s 7,700 people taking action. Trump’s Reiner post demonstrates each element—it delegitimizes Reiner’s opposition as “mind crippling disease” rather than principled critique, suggests consequences by claiming Reiner “caused anger” in others through his “obsession” (explicitly linking political speech to violent response), celebrates outcomes by framing the “Golden Age of America” as arriving in the same breath as describing the critic’s death, and maintains plausible deniability because Trump didn’t say anyone should kill Trump critics, he just explained why this critic died (from his own “derangement”) and why America is better now.

Research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Anti-Defamation League documents the relationship between extremist rhetoric and subsequent violence. The pattern is consistent: dehumanizing language precedes action, and each instance of celebrated violence lowers the threshold for the next. This mechanism can be seen operating in my own limited scope when Fandom Pulse published a hit piece accusing me of “Trump Derangement” after I was canceled by my publisher for identifying specific extremist patterns of dehumanizing rhetoric—the same playbook Trump used on Reiner’s corpse, different audience size. Pathologize dissent, celebrate consequences, maintain deniability while signaling permission to the base.

The Two-Tier Problem

One sociopathic president isn’t the threat. Seventy-seven million people voting for him is. The coalition breaks down roughly into two tiers: most of the 77 million are true believers who think opposition to Trump is mental illness—they’re not stupid in some global sense, they’re captured by propaganda that exploits existing fears and resentments while providing simple explanatory frameworks. “Average IQ is 100,” as one commenter noted. These are people for whom faith and social belonging override evidence evaluation. They see Trump’s Reiner post and think “he’s right, TDS killed another one.”

Then there’s the smaller tier of cynical operators—people like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Jon Del Arroz—who understand the manipulation and deploy it anyway. They know Trump is lying. They know the rhetoric is dangerous. They just don’t care because it serves their interests: power consolidation, money, ideological goals, or simple dominance. These people deserve contempt, not sympathy. They’re not confused. They’re fucking complicit.

The danger emerges from the interaction between tiers. The cynical operators construct the propaganda (“TDS”). The true believers internalize it and act on it—sometimes through voting, sometimes through harassment campaigns, sometimes through violence. The operators maintain deniability while the believers do the work. The V-Dem Institute predicted in March 2025 that US democracy wouldn’t survive six months under a second Trump administration—V-Dem Director Staffan I. Lindberg stated explicitly: “If it continues like this, democracy [in the US] will not last another six months.” By September 2025, Lindberg confirmed the US had crossed into electoral autocracy. Trump mocking a murder victim’s corpse with 30.5K likes (and counting) and zero institutional consequences is what democratic backsliding looks like in practice.

Trump Supporters Are Out of Excuses

I completely understand why people initially voted for Trump. Economic anxiety is real. Media ecosystem capture is real. Legitimate grievances about institutional failure are real (even when weaponized by bad actors). Even concerns about erosion of Second Amendment rights are real. But there was a window for that understanding, and the window slammed shut months ago.

And now Trump mocks a murder victim, attributes the death to political opposition while the actual killer is in custody, and receives mass celebration from his base with zero institutional pushback. Continuing to support him requires one of four conditions: ignorance (not knowing what’s happening due to information ecosystem problems), cognitive limitation (unable to process what’s happening), psychological breakdown (knowing but unable to accept reality), or moral bankruptcy (knowing and choosing it anyway).

There’s no fifth category. Not anymore.

This isn’t about policy disagreements. It’s about whether you accept that the President of the Fucking United States can weaponize a double homicide for political messaging and face no consequences. If you’re fine with that, we’re not having a political disagreement—we’re having a moral one. And you’re on the side of the devils.

The Expanding Envelope

Each transgression without consequences becomes the new baseline. Trump mocked John McCain for being a POW. Trump mocked a disabled reporter. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville. Trump incited January 6th. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. Trump mocked a murder victim while the killer was in custody. Each time, his base celebrated. Each time, institutions failed to impose meaningful consequences. Each time, the envelope expanded.

The ratchet only turns one direction. Next time will be worse because this time established that “worse” is acceptable. And here’s the recursive trap: I’m writing this analysis knowing it makes me a target of the exact mechanism I’m documenting. When you identify how stochastic terrorism works, you get accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” When you document the propaganda, you become evidence of the propaganda’s necessity. The system is self-sealing—anyone who tries to analyze it proves through their analysis that they’re diseased and deserving of consequences.

That’s not a bug. That’s the system working as designed. Trump can mock murder victims because his base celebrates it, and anyone who objects is diseased, and their objection proves their disease, and their disease explains why they suffer consequences, which the base celebrates, which proves the system works. The circle closes perfectly. You can’t document stochastic terrorism without becoming its next target, which proves the mechanism exists while demonstrating why analysis of it gets suppressed.

I’m writing this anyway. Not because it will change Trump supporters’ minds—it won’t. The true believers can’t see it. The cynical operators don’t care. But documentation matters when history judges what we saw and whether we spoke. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it isn’t. I’m not convinced either way. But the alternative is silence, and silence is worse than permission, it’s complicity, and we don’t owe the machinery our silence even when speaking feeds it.

Especially then.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​