Well, I'm coming to you after the news I taped previously.

I taped the episode on Sunday evening, but before we found out about Rob Reiner.

And I'll be honest when I think about the introduction to the episode earlier for my podcast, and it was focused more of what happened in Australia.

You know, by the time I woke up Monday morning, it was felt like a totality of just grief, you know, had sort of been piled on top of us.

Whether you're thinking about what happened at Brown University, what happened in Australia, and then just the gruesome attack on Rob Reiner and his wife and the murder of those two, it was just collectively, you know, just you wake up in sort of a funk, feeling just really just I can't you know, look, look, everybody processes these things differently.

I don't want to assume other people are processing but you're just feeling really just down, you know.

I happened to Actually, my wife and I just watched spinal Tap two Friday evening.

It was you know, there we were looking for something to watch.

We finished Ploribus and we weren't ready to fall asleep.

We had seen the new sort of that, and I was like, oh, I've been meaning to take a look.

And I think the second Spinal Tap finally started streaming this weekend, so it was getting certainly promoted on my algorithm because I am a gen xer, right, I am the target audience for this.

And in fact, my wife and I and were remarking, just you know, not all of these sort of throwback sequels work, right, You've heard me say Naked Gun didn't work.

But this one worked, and it was sort of it was because Reyner knew, you know, I just understood whatever it was.

He just sort of he understood what Spinal Tap was trying to be, what they were, and it was just sort of it was just well done.

Not all those sequels are easy to pull off.

Sometimes they're just simply money grabs.

This one didn't.

It felt sure there was a there was there was an opportunity, but it felt like it was well constructed, well thought out, and had the right right amount of throwback and look forward.

And then I saw what the President said about Rob Reiner and it was so disgusting, It was so awful, It was so classless, and I know we're all exhausted from being exhausted by him, right, But at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, the President of the United States is our representative, is our collective representative.

And you know, I certainly go into the voting booth thinking about that.

You know, is this person the best representative of America?

You know, and a moment when you need somebody to put the country first, at a moment when you need somebody to be empathetic, does this person have that skill set?

And look, we've had presidents that have been better at it than others.

Some are really good at it.

They just have that that, you know.

Barack Obama, George W.

Bush, Bill Clinton, all three of them always felt like, you know, they met moments when they when it needed to be done.

Ronald Reagan would meet moments when he'd done.

H.

W.

Bush Actually he had a harder times at times.

It maybe explains why he didn't get a second term.

Right.

Bill Clinton just had had that extra factor to it.

But in general, we've always had a president that knew how to put you know, sort of not put them insert themselves into everything.

And you know, just to the comment himself, the idea that the President the United States implied that Rob Reiner's political disagreements with Donald Trump or what got him murdered.

It's essentially what he's saying.

Can you just pure and utter in sanity to think that that's a level of sick narcissism?

And I'm not going to sit here and say I'm an expert at trying to diagnose people, But my god, how narcissistic do you have to be to assume everything is about you, that everything is about this moment about you, and you have to assert you know, there's the cliche, you know, the famous quote about Teddy Roosevelt.

He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.

I mean, this is a form of that mental illness on display for all of us to see.

But you know there are times, you know, on one hand, look, I think we're all used to it by now.

Look, I believe the reason he didn't win reelection in twenty twenty is his inability to have empathy during COVID Right, he just was not the person we wanted to deal with that moment.

He was not handling it well, he was not understanding it.

He was not getting it, and it was just like give you know, we need some we need some restoration of normality.

And Biden was seen as sort of a comfortable figure, a previous vice president.

He sort of he knows how, he understands the rules of the road.

He will do those basics right, you know, he will show the right amount of empathy.

He will work, you know, not try to exploit people the way the way the way Trump can be so exploitive of a moment and you're just sitting there and you know our inability, you know the fact that Donald Trump is trying to always make somebody's politics the first thing you think about, rather than anything else in their lives is what's broken about America right now?

And he broke it right.

He is exploiting this moment.

He is right.

The social media companies and Donald Trump have collectively have tried to break us this way, and he is he is broken, and he is trying to apply his broken lack of empathy, lack of emotion on the rest of us.

But he wants to apply politics to every thing.

When Rob Reiner's artistic work deserves to be celebrated as a great American period, Okay, no matter his politics, he provided art that entertained so many of us left and right.

Ted Cruz's favorite movie is Princess Bride.

Ted Cruse probably knows every single lie.

I know.

Ted Cruz and Rob Reiners don't share the same politics.

But Ted Cruz loved Princess Bride, loved the creation of Rob Reiner.

And I think, no matter what you think of Ted Cruz, the last thing I think he would do is behave is horrendously and is inhumane.

And that's what this was.

As Donald Trump did about this, there are many people, whether it's spinal tap, whether it's when Harry met Sally, whether it's All in the Family, which, by the way, a program that sort of promoted dialogue between people that disagree him.

The liberal son in law are Chiep Bunker a more intellectually honest version of Donald Trump, at least one with empathy.

And I'll tell you it is.

It is one of the things that I've pledged to do with what I want to do here is to try to be a bit more dispassionate about Trump, because there is there is you know, some people are so focused on Trump.

We've got to figure out how do we how do we prevent the next Trump?

And how do we move past Trump?

How do we get past this?

We're better than this.

We have we have, we have real we should have real debates between how big or small government is, how much you know, how high or low taxes should be?

You know, whose responsibility should it be to provide healthcare?

These are important debates.

I think the distinctions between left and right are interesting and should be negotiated and should be debated.

Donald Trump is not a right winger a left winger.

He is he is.

He is a virus of polarization right.

He is sort of the symptom of polarization at its worst.

He is exploitive of the situation in order to garner power.

But you know it is.

He is not representative of real conservatives.

He is not representative of normal acting human beings, regardless of where they are in the political spectrum.

Who know that when there's a tragedy in my goodness, the man has not been buried yet, his family and friends are still trying to figure out what the hell happened.

There hadn't even been an arrest yet at the time that he puts out this tweet.

And again, you could sit here and say, oh, we're obsessing over a mean tweet.

But he's all of our representatives right at the end of the day, our president is our president.

And it is embarrassing.

It is classless.

And I'm going to quote my friend David Brodie of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

He put it in another way.

He just he called it sad because what it tells you.

It says so much about who Donald Trump is.

Right, he is a man with you know, I've brought this up before.

He is so broken emotionally.

He has no there's no set of people that are his friends.

The reason he has to go out to the mar A Lago dinner table all the time and to celebrate with is he has no personal friends people.

It's clear there aren't people that people that are around him because they want to be close to power and they think they can grift him or exploit him.

People don't hang around with him.

Maybe they hang around him because he's he's entertaining for all the wrong reasons, Like you can't believe what he'll say, you can't believe the gossip he wants to gossip about, so he's like shut He's sort of like a shock jock.

Right, it's entertaining, but you realize you don't want to leave your kids with him.

You don't want your grandkids to learn from him.

You don't want people to copy that behavior.

And you know, he it's so funny.

He's so desperate to be famous, and he's so desperate to leave a legacy.

He's leaving a legacy, and it's people are gonna, they're gonna they're going to race to erase him in different ways.

You know, he's trying to force his way onto the zeitgeist of America.

Right, he's going to insert himself into America's two an and fiftieth birthday.

He wants to put his name on the Kennedy Center.

He wants to put his name on the White House, so that you know, there's the Truman Balcony and there'll be the Trump Ballroom, right, he wants he's hoping that that's somehow going to give him something that I guess life has not been able to give him.

Right.

He has been sort of one of the most successive failures in American history.

Right, He's a failed casino owner, a failed developer, a failed an owner of golf courses, meaning that He's never made money on these businesses, and only his political power and fame has allowed actual value to created with his developments and all of this stuff.

But he was actually failures at all of those things.

Probably the most successful thing he was able to do was have a TV show in The Apprentice, that was a failure, a success until it became a failure, and ultimately he's going to be considered a political failure.

He knew how to get elected, he knew how to get campaign.

But when you behave this way, right, it's everybody I'm sure that has had a moment where you've had a tragedy in your life.

You always remember the people that surprised you and that positive or negative, And this is one of those where in some ways Trump isn't surprising by his behavior, but I think this is one of those where even those that want to defend him and I look, I know that there are people that voted for Donald Trump who didn't like them, and in fact, he is sort of the you know, I call it the a whole constituency, right, meaning there are people who believe politics is so seemly, seeming unseemly, it's so such a such a sort of pit of grimy people and grifters that hey, guess what it's going to take an a whole to govern and to get involved in politics.

I know there's some people think that, right, I mean, there's you know, I happen to believe that that, yes, there's no doubt is a griminess to politics.

There's the metaphor that, you know, the sausage you don't want to see the sausage, the sausage made in how Congress acts.

But I think a lot more of us want to know that we have.

You want the president to be able to go high and low, and this president only knows how to go low.

As president, never knows how to go high.

And anytime he's even tried to pretend, he's always reading so you know, sort of directly in staccato, like from the prompter, it's clear he's never personally felt these feelings.

And again, all you have to do is look at it.

You know, he's His personal relationships don't last about every six years, he has a new band of advisors.

This goes back through his entire professional career.

I've studied it, going all the way back to when he got his start with his father, in the early seventies, and whoever was in his inner circle lasted somewhere between six and eight years, and they were gone, and they were gone because he wanted him out and they want it out.

Right.

Michael Cohen is just one of the you know, the most recent examples of John Kelly.

And there is a pattern here, right.

Everybody who breaks away from him never has anything nice to say about him, and it's because of moments like this.

And he did his inability to read a room, his inability to be an American before he's a partisan exploiter of our polarization, and that's what he did.

It's gross, it's sick, and look, it's going to get an outsized amount of attention.

And you know, some of you may even be criticizing some of us that are trying to bring more attention to it, right, And this is a case where we could chase every outrage, and I try not to chase every outrage, but this one, this one really pissed me off because it was one of those things where I just I was just feeling so down about humans, right, about society, about what happened in Australia, about what happened to brown and then you know, you realize how much Rob Reiner sort of created so many things that sort of defined pop culture for gen X.

I mean, I've probably seen a few Good Men more parts of that movie more than any movie I've seen, maybe pulp Fiction and Big Lebowski would be second and third.

For those of you that know me, I just it's Rob Reiner deserves to be celebrated.

And I'm I'm hardened to see so many normal left and right thinking people on social media be disgusted about how the president's behaved over this.

But this is one of those moments and when you're when when Republicans are trying to figure out, boy, why are they you know, why is it harder to motivate the base and why is it harder to win over swing voters?

He's becoming less likable every day and when he and this is one of those other things politically, the economy is not feeling great and he's behaving unlikably, it's a toxic mix that actually can accelerate the perception of he's losing its status, right, And that's the other thing you have to ask yourself, like this is we know as you get older, the filter goes away.

We know he's never had much of a filter as it is, but I actually think Donald Trump of eight years ago would have had a little bit more, a little bit more of a small g governor on himself about this moment and maybe have at least waited a few days before doing what he did.

But to insert himself the way he did, because ultimately he thinks everything is about him and every moment is about him.

And just to imply the disgusting implication that somehow this murder had something to do with Donald Trump is just it to me, should be a red flag that there's something wrong in that Oval office at the moment, and perhaps more people need to speak out.

We've talked about that in the previous administration.

Are if you see something, say something, as anybody in this inner circle willing to say, whoa this is?

You know, do we have an issue here?

Do we have a problem here?

Because this was this is this is unhinged.

And if put it this way, if any relative, and I'm guessing, and I'll just speak for myself, if I had a relative that sort of behaved this way, I'd be questioning what was going on inside their lives at the moment that this is how they're thinking.

You're like, wow, you are living in a deluded world in a moment that that maybe you ought to you ought to not be making very important decisions at the moment.

So look, I think this is It's both revealing and not surprising, and yet the gut punch in the shock is awful.

So I don't know.

I think this is one that will you know, nothing lingers in the Trump era, but some things, you know, this may be this, this may stick to him for a little bit longer than usual, especially by doing this sort of in this moment that he chose to do it.

All right, I just thought i'd check in on that.

If you want more of this or I've got uh please check out the The Check podcast wherever you get your podcast here on YouTube, Spotify, or anywhere else you go.

Thanks for listening.

H