Trump’s Attacks on Rob Reiner and Others Characterize an Uninhibited 2nd Term
Shouting, Ranting, Insulting: Trump’s Uninhibited Second Term
Many of President Trump’s supporters love his professional-wrestling style of leadership. But some of his recent attacks have sickened even some of his own political allies.
By Peter Baker
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and co-author of a book about President Trump’s first term. He reported from Washington.
It all might make more sense if he actually were drinking. By all accounts, President Trump doesn’t touch the stuff. So when his own chief of staff said that he has “an alcoholic’s personality,” she was talking about his larger-than-life nature rather than his consumption.
Yet in some ways, it may be an apt description for a president who seems even less inhibited than ever in a way that has many in Washington and beyond shaking their heads or even wondering if the leader of the free world has lost it. The word often whispered by Republicans and shouted by Democrats and Never Trumpers is “unhinged.”
It was one thing when Mr. Trump called a reporter “piggy.” Or casually threatened to put a half-dozen members of Congress to death for accurately stating the laws of war. Or labeled all Somali immigrants “garbage.” Or declared that daring to question his physical energy level at age 79 was “seditious, perhaps even treasonous.” But when Mr. Trump cavalierly attacked the Hollywood icon Rob Reiner just hours after his body was found in a grisly murder scene, it sickened even some of his own political allies.
He followed that no-he-didn’t-just-say-that-did-he performance this week by adding a series of plaques underneath portraits of past presidents on the wall of the Colonnade at the White House that brazenly denigrated some of his predecessors. In effect, he bronzed some of his cartoonish social media juvenilia and bolted it to the taxpayer-owned building where two Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan once lived.
“He’s just lost it,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on social media after the president lashed out at Mr. Reiner. After seeing pictures of the new White House plaques, Mr. Murphy added, “He is such a sad, damaged person.”
Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, was equally appalled by the attack on Mr. Reiner. “I’d expect to hear something like this from a drunk guy at a bar, not the president of the United States,” he told CNN. “Can the president be presidential?”
Can he be? Does he actually want to be? He has long mocked the very idea of acting presidential. His critics were hardly reassured by his fact-distorting, sharply partisan, prime-time televised address to the nation on Wednesday night in which he seemed to be trying to shout Americans into believing the country is doing better than polls show they think it is.
The White House dismissed the critics. “President Trump is a truth-teller and calls it like he sees it,” Steven Cheung, the communications director, said in an email. “The fact remains that President Trump is the best president in our country’s history, while Sleepy Joe Biden will go down as the worst.”
Haranguing, raging and insulting, of course, have all been part of Mr. Trump’s larger-than-life personality for generations and are an element of his appeal to supporters who find it bracingly authentic in a world of cookie-cutter, talking points-reading politicians. They love his professional-wrestling style of leadership. He tells it like it is. He’s not afraid to mix it up. He takes down the elites and the “woke” liberals.
This is a presidency that celebrates nastiness and spite, not empathy or grace, a reflection, perhaps, of a coarser era in American life. It is not enough to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally; Mr. Trump and his administration make a point of releasing demeaning videos and photographs of them being arrested or imprisoned. He has spread A.I.-generated images of former President Barack Obama being arrested and of himself as a military pilot bombing anti-Trump protesters with excrement. He attacks female reporters for their looks.
“What makes Trump great is that he speaks truths others are afraid to speak,” Eric Metaxas, a conservative author and commentator, wrote about the new White House plaques deriding Mr. Obama and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Every word on these plaques is true. What’s shocking and refreshing is that he has put them out for all to see.”
Mr. Bacon’s “drunk guy at a bar” comparison came even before Vanity Fair published a set of remarkably unguarded interviews with Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, who among other things offered the “alcoholic’s personality” analogy.
She did not mean it as criticism, but as a way of understanding the president’s unpredictable, attention-seeking, unrestrained behavior. She compared him to her father, Pat Summerall, the football player and sportscaster, who was an absentee parent and an alcoholic.
“High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink,” she said. “And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Mr. Trump’s “alcoholic’s personality,” she said, means that he operates with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Mr. Trump did not take offense at the description. In fact, he embraced it. “I’ve said that many times about myself,” he told the New York Post. “I’m fortunate I’m not a drinker. If I did, I could very well, because I’ve said that — what’s the word? Not possessive — possessive and addictive type personality. Oh, I’ve said it many times, many times before.”
Mr. Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., was an alcoholic and died in 1981 at the age of 43, a tragedy that deeply affected the future president. He has often ascribed his aversion to drinking to his brother’s decline. And he has used it as one of the only self-deprecating lines he typically offers. “Can you imagine if I had” been a drinker, he asked at one point in 2018. “What a mess I would be. I would be the world’s worst.”
But in recent weeks, Mr. Trump has adamantly denied any cognitive issues, saying that he had taken three exams measuring his mental acuity, including one recently. “I ACED all three of them in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know,” he wrote online. “I have been told that few people have been able to ‘ace’ this Examination.”
Alcoholism is a disease, of course. So is narcissism, which Mr. Trump has in the past admitted to. “Narcissism can be a useful quality if you’re trying to start a business,” he wrote in one of his books. “A narcissist does not hear the naysayers.”
The naysayers would tell him that presidents do not traditionally name things after themselves the way a real estate developer does, but he would not hear that. Mr. Trump has been on something of a naming kick lately. Just on Thursday, the White House announced that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts would be renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center.
The Trump administration just renamed the Institute of Peace the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. It announced that Mr. Trump’s birthday, which is the same day as Flag Day, would be a free-admission holiday at national parks next year while ending free admission for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Park annual passes in 2026 will have Mr. Trump’s image on them alongside George Washington’s. So may commemorative Trump coins that the Treasury Department is considering for next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
New federal child investment accounts created this year were designated “Trump accounts.” In his speech on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump touted a new government website called TrumpRx to help Americans get lower-priced prescription drugs. Few doubt that Mr. Trump might name the gargantuan new White House ballroom he is building after himself. He has even suggested that the Washington Commanders name their new stadium after him.
No other president has done that while in office. Kennedy was dead by the time they named the arts center after him. So were Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln when monuments were built to them in the nation’s capital. Ronald Reagan was nearly a decade out of office when Congress and President Bill Clinton put his name on Washington National Airport.
Mr. Trump’s sense of himself as the center of the universe was made all too clear with his attack on Mr. Reiner. The killings of the famed director and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had nothing to do with politics, according to authorities. But Mr. Trump decided to make it about himself with a bizarre social media post suggesting that their deaths were “reportedly due to the anger” at Mr. Reiner, an outspoken liberal, for “his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
Even after the Reiners’ son Nick Reiner was arrested in connection with the attack, Mr. Trump doubled down, telling reporters, “Well, I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person,” and adding, “I thought he was very bad for our country.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Mr. Trump and his allies were attacking liberals who made insensitive or less-than-compassionate comments about the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk after he was assassinated, accusing them of cheering his death.
“If you celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death, you should not be protected from being fired for being a disgusting person,” Vice President JD Vance said at the time. More than 600 Americans were eventually fired, suspended or otherwise punished for comments deemed to be celebrating or trivializing Mr. Kirk’s murder or even just criticizing his politics, according to a Reuters investigation.
One of those who did not applaud or make light of Mr. Kirk’s death was Mr. Reiner, who went on Piers Morgan’s show at the time to call it an “absolute horror” and said, “I don’t care what your political beliefs are; that’s not acceptable.”
It might not have surprised him that Mr. Trump would not follow that example.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.