What Rob Reiner Told Me About Trump and His Hope for the Future
“I’m trying to push back as best I can,” the director said in an interview three months before he was murdered. “And hopefully we can preserve democracy.”
Rob Reiner was deeply troubled by the state of his country in the months leading up to his death.
The legendary comedian and filmmaker told me during a September episode of “The Last Laugh” podcast that he was having trouble reading the news “beyond the headlines” because everything that was happening during Trump’s second term was “very disturbing” to him.
Reiner, 78, and his wife, Michelle, 68, were killed Sunday at their Los Angeles home. Their son, Nick Reiner, 32, is currently in police custody. Rob and Nick, who collaborated in 2015 on a film chronicling Nick’s struggle with drug addiction, were seen arguing the previous evening at Conan O’Brien’s annual Christmas party.
The nature of their violent argument remains a private matter, but that didn’t stop President Trump from declaring on Monday, in an incoherent social media post, that Reiner’s death was “due to the anger he stirred in others because of his severe and incurable mental illness known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”.”
Reiner had been one of Trump’s fiercest critics since his initial presidential election victory in 2016. That spring, the year of Trump’s inauguration, I spoke with Reiner outside the TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where he and his father, comedy icon Carl Reiner, had left their handprints and footprints in the cement, side by side.
“What’s happening in our country right now is a tragedy of unprecedented proportions,” Reiner said at the time. “It’s a real test for our democracy: Can we tolerate this kind of chaos?” “To have a president who is so ignorant, so narcissistic, a pathological liar—and who clearly suffers from some kind of mental illness, I don’t know what it is. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
When we spoke again for the podcast more than eight years later, Trump was back for a second term, and Reiner was even more fearful that America was becoming the fascist state his Jewish grandparents had fled.
Reiner told me that his wife Michelle’s mother had been imprisoned at Auschwitz and had “lost her entire family there; she was the only survivor.”
Reiner, who considered Norman Lear, the creator of “All in the Family,” who died two years ago at the age of 101, his “second father,” added, “He flew 52 bombing missions over Nazi Germany, and millions of people died so that we wouldn’t see what’s happening in America today… Make no mistake, we are there, and we have to acknowledge it.”
Reiner continued, “What do we do? Well, we have to do everything we can. So I’m trying to resist as much as I can, in every way I can, and I hope we can preserve democracy, because it’s a 250-year-old experiment that has evolved and improved over the years.”
He added, “So I hope we survive this crisis. And if we do, it’s going to take a long time to rebuild this utopia, this beacon for the world. This country was once a welcoming place for immigrants. Diversity was our strength. And now people are being deported without due process. What’s happening in America is a nightmare. And I hope people realize it. The situation is very serious in this country right now.” Despite his pessimism about the country’s situation,
Reiner never lost the hope that allowed him to believe things would eventually get better.
At the end of what should have been our last conversation, Reiner brought up a discussion he had had with the renowned activist Jane Fonda about the need to encourage influential figures to speak out against the Trump administration.
“Maybe we can use this situation to start resisting tyranny and fascism,” Reiner said optimistically. “We haven’t found a solution yet, but we’re hopeful.”
