Rob Reiner was deeply concerned about the state of his country in the final months before his death.
The legendary comedian, actor, and director confessed to me during an episode of The Last Laugh podcast in September that he was having trouble reading “past the headlines” of the news because he found everything going on in the second Trump administration so “disturbing.”
Reiner, 78, and his wife Michele, 68, were murdered at their Los Angeles home on Sunday. Police currently have the couple’s son Nick Reiner, 32, in custody. Rob and Nick, who collaborated on a 2015 film about Nick’s addiction struggles, were reportedly spotted having a heated argument at Conan O’Brien’s annual Christmas party the night before.
The true nature of their intense conflict remains a private matter, but that did not stop President Trump from declaring in a particularly unhinged social media post on Monday that Reiner’s death was “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
Reiner was indeed an outspoken critic of Trump, dating back to his first successful run for president in 2016. The spring after Trump took office, Reiner and I chatted outside the TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where he and his father, comedy icon Carl Reiner, had just put their hand and footprints in the cement next to each other.
“This is a tragedy of epic proportions, what we have going on in our country right now,” Reiner said at the time. “It’s a real test to our democracy, whether we can withstand this kind of disruption. To have a president who is so ignorant, so egotistical, and a pathological liar—and he definitely has some kind of mental challenges, I don’t know what it is, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
By the time we spoke again on the podcast more than eight years later, Trump was back in office for his second term, and Reiner was even more fearful about the prospect of America becoming something more akin to the fascism his Jewish forebears had escaped.
Reiner shared with me that his wife Michele’s mother had been imprisoned in Auschwitz and “lost her entire family there, she was the only survivor.”
Describing All in the Family creator Norman Lear, who died at 101 two years ago, as his “second father,” Reiner added, “He flew 52 bombing missions over Nazi Germany, and millions and millions of people died so that we wouldn’t have what we see happening now in America… And make no mistake, this is where we are right now, and we have to become aware of it.”
“And what do we do about that? Well, we have to do whatever we can,” Reiner continued. “And so I’m trying to push back as best I can in ways that I know how, and hopefully we can preserve democracy because it’s a 250-year experiment that has, in fits and starts, improved itself.”
“So I’m hoping we’ll survive this,” he added. “And if we do, it’s going to take a long time to rebuild the shining city on the hill, the beacon to the rest of the world. This used to be the place that welcomed immigrants. Diversity was our strength. And now people are being thrown out of the country without due process. It’s nightmarish what’s happening in America. And, hopefully, people will be able to see that. It’s as bad as anything could be in this country at this point.”
But as dark as he could get about the state of the country, Reiner never lost the hopeful streak that made him believe things could get better again.
Toward the end of what would be our last talk, Reiner recalled a conversation he had with fellow celebrity activist Jane Fonda about galvanizing people in influential positions to speak out against the Trump regime.
“Maybe there’s a way that we can harness that to start pushing back on autocracy and fascism,” Reiner said, optimistically. “We haven’t figured that out yet, but hopefully we can.”
The post What Rob Reiner Told Me About Trump and His Hope for the Future appeared first on The Daily Beast.
