I remember Ronald Reagan’s speech after the horror of the Challenger Disaster, where he described the lost astronauts as having “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” The last thing he seemed to be thinking about was which of them had supported him politically. He was speaking from the heart, and he behaved as the President of the United States is expected to do.
Over the last week, the world has been shocked by three tragedies in a row: a mass shooting at Brown University; a massacre of Jews gathered to celebrate Hannukah on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia; and the horrific murders of director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle in Los Angeles. All of those events left decent people reeling.
But not President Trump. Rather, he took the occasion of Reiner’s murder to post a genuinely deranged message criticizing the director - and relating all of it to himself, of course. While widely condemned for the post, the President did nothing but double down when asked about it. This nastiness is something we’ve come to expect from him at this point, but today’s post magnified it by ten. None of us should forget: this man has his finger on the nuclear code.
The lack of human decency of which this President is capable should concern all of us. It’s not a joke. It’s not “owning the libs.” It’s a terrifying example of someone for whom human suffering and death mean very little, unless caring would somehow serve himself.
We have got to stop normalizing the President’s behavior. It is not normal. And we’ve got to stop excusing those in power who are letting him get away with this. He is not getting better, he is getting worse.
What can we do? Well, what you and I can do is very little. But there is a group of people who can do a lot: Republican Congressmen and Senators. A few of them, plus other conservative voices, have addressed the Reiner murders appropriately. But we need more than that. We need the Republican Party to censure the President’s words. In this case, silence is complicity. And complicity in such psychotic behavior, perpetrated at the highest levels of the U.S. government, is chilling.
May God bless those who died, and also those now living. Amen.
