This Monday, just before nine in the morning, the president of the United States of America, in a post on the social network Truth Social (which he created after being expelled from Twitter following the assault on the Capitol in January 2021), wrote about the murder of director Rob Reiner. Reiner was found dead on Sunday, in his home, as was his wife, photographer Michelle Singer, apparently from a stabbing; one of the couple’s children was detained.
And what did Trump have to say about this tragedy? That the deaths were due to “the anger that Reiner caused to others due to his incurable condition with a disabling mental illness” which he calls “Trump derangement syndrome”, that is, “Trump disturbance syndrome”. In other words, he presented — justified — the murders as a consequence of criticism of himself.
In the comments to the post, there are those who say “I really respect him, but this is heartless and unnecessary”; “terrible post and I’m a big supporter”; “then, Mr President, this is not appropriate”. On Twitter/X, a self-confessed friend of Trump, Piers Morgan, advised him to delete the post, then recalling, in contrast, Reiner’s shocked reaction to the death of Charlie Kirk, the influencer far-right fighter murdered in September.
At the time, Reiner said: “It’s a horror, an absolute horror. (…) It’s unbelievable, and it shouldn’t happen to anyone, regardless of their political ideas. It’s not acceptable (…).”
It’s that simple, isn’t it? Well, not for Trump — and it’s not that it’s anything new. For example, it is enough to remember how not even a month ago he reacted to a journalist’s courageous question to the Saudi prince and Prime Minister Mohammad bin Salman, during his lavish visit to the White House, about the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in his country’s consulate in Istanbul (homicide and dismemberment that, remember, the American secret services concluded were ordered by bin Salman). What
Trump said at that time that it is not very different from what he now said about Reiner: justified the murder claiming that Khashoggi was “extremely controversial”, “there were a lot of people who didn’t like him”, and “it happened”. As if “look, bad luck, don’t act like a hero and criticize this good guy here”.
The difference, for those who now see Trump’s words about Reiner with horror, will be that Khashoggi was Saudi and was murdered, in what for Americans is a remote part of the world, for his political positions on the orders of the all-powerful prince, while Reiner and his wife were Americans, white and, everything leads us to believe, perished at the hands of a crazy son. Therefore, politicizing their deaths, presenting them as a result of their respective positions on Trump, goes down badly even with MAGA supporters (from Make America Great Again, Trump’s slogan). Not because they are shocked by the persistent insensitivity and obscenity of a president that the American people elected by a large majority when they had all the information necessary to know who he is, but because the application of these “qualities” in this case seems “out of place” to them.
There is, therefore, no reason to believe that this repugnant pronouncement will lead to a turning point or even constitute a sign that such a turning point is happening — even though the latest polls show that Trump’s approval rating has fallen below 40%. Because it was exactly this person devoid of a sense of State and mere decency, committed to destroying the democratic regime and replacing it with an autocracy, who they wanted to elect in 2024.
In addition to the obvious practical consequences it is having for the world — and particularly for Europe — Trump’s case is also a study in the sense in which we demonstrates how it is possible to brutalize the debate and stultify public sensitivity until things like the post you produced about Reiner are just another news item which causes some consternation but doesn’t change anything. In fact, it was he, in an act of prescience, who stated, in January 2016, that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and would not lose his supporters.
Like Trump, his disciple André Ventura is convinced that the more brutal his speech becomes, the more violent, defamatory and slanderous he becomes, the more he gains. And, unfortunately, every day we see how these “qualities” of yours are normalized, as they were under Trump, by those who inform and comment. It is about watching the presidential post-debate comments, with their childish attributions of “notes”, to see that the Chega leader’s permanent lies, defamatory statements, slander and insults, are not, as a rule, a reason for a bad score.
In fact, at SIC-N, following his debate with Jorge Pinto, there was even a commentator, the journalist from Express Angela Silva, who he clarified that he did not value Ventura’s lies, “otherwise he would always be negative”. Ângela was responding to her editorial comrade Vitor Matos and the fact that he expressed incomprehension with, precisely, this non-appreciation.
Now: If journalists (it is important to be journalists) do not value, in the sense of revealing, explaining, disapproving, the lies and, therefore, also the defamation and slander of a presidential candidate, who is responsible for doing so? If the pivots of the debates don’t even raise an eyebrow when André Ventura once again slanders Paulo Pedroso and Ferro Rodrigues or accuses Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa of “treason against the country” (as this Monday, a Chega deputy accused, in SIC-N, the Constitutional Court of “treason against Portugal” for having failed several norms of the nationality law), as if it were normal, as if it were acceptable, as if it were not criminal, they are not being accomplices to these defamations?
In 2021, in the debate with the then presidential candidate Marcelo, Ventura showed a photo of the President of the Republic with a family living in the Jamaica neighborhood and accused him of having been with “thugs”. Neither Marcelo nor Clara de Sousa, the journalist who moderated (the verb is clearly misused) on the occasion, asked him why he was accusing those people, whom he did not even identify and who even included a child, of being criminals. No one thought to ask if Ventura was making that accusation because they were black people living in a degraded neighborhood. In other words, none of them did the minimum that was required of them — of the acting president, in addition to being a jurist and constitutionalist, as required by the position and defending the constitutional principle of equality, and of the journalist, because she was a journalist. Likewise, in the comments that followed the debate, not a single commentator valued the episode.
It was necessary for that family to seek justice in court, which neither the President nor the media knew how to do for them. How, four years later, it became necessary to go to court again because of defamatory, racist and xenophobic posters from the same candidate/party.
There will be those who, when faced with this, say: “And it won’t be of any use, because it will continue, in fact it feeds on it”. Yes, it feeds on this, without a doubt, but it is with the normalization effortfully carried out by all those who had the obligation to denounce and combat it — and here I include all those who consider themselves democrats and decent —, normalization that they excuse with “doing differently would serve no purpose” or, worse, “that is not our role”, that makes it most fattening. Because, dear ones, if that is not our role, what is our role?