“Fucking grotesque.” “A monstrosity.” “A real post by the president of the United States, who has the nuclear codes.” “DESPICABLE.”

This is but a sampling of the reaction to President Donald Trump’s Monday morning response to the apparent double murder of iconic film director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner—who were among Hollywood’s most vocal critics of the president and the threat he posed to US democracy.

Trump took to his Truth Social network to make the deaths about himself:

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!

“Nobody celebrates the murder of perceived enemies quite like Trump—whose celebration of the murder of Rob Reiner is the most disturbing, deranged, and demented post you’ll ever see from a US president,” singer-songwriter and activist Bill Madden said on social media.

If the New York Times was waiting for a news hook to write a long-overdue story about how Trump is mentally unfit to be president, Trump has provided one today with his post saying Rob Reiner got murdered because he was mean to Trump.Write it, NYT. End the normalization. @nytimes.com

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— Mark Jacob (@markjacob.bsky.social) December 15, 2025 at 7:26 AM

Even Trump’s supporters could not believe the president actually posted the message, with some seeking confirmation from Grok, the generative artificial intelligence chatbot on Elon Musk’s social media site X, that the post was “fake.” Grok obliged, replying falsely that “the statement attributed to Trump is not real” and “appears fabricated.”

Invoking the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk—the far-right firebrand known for purveying racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynistic rhetoric from behind a shield of “free speech”—Democratic strategist Max Burns said, “I don’t want to hear another sanctimonious word from the Republicans who accused Democrats of not showing enough sadness when Charlie Kirk died.”

“Trump is dancing on Reiner’s body and blaming Reiner for his own murder—but remember, they demanded people be FIRED for not dropping down in tears to praise Charlie Kirk after his death,” Burns added. “It’s all an act. These people only have compassion for their own.”

Some also pointed out that in contrast to Trump’s comments, after Kirk’s killing, Reiner called the assassination an “absolute horror” and condemned political violence.

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