President Trump managed to make the news cycle about himself (again), by seeming to insinuate that movie director Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered because Reiner had criticized the president. On today’s episode of The Editors, Jim takes Trump to task.
“A lot of people . . . want to just go right over this. It’s embarrassing, and they just want to pretend it didn’t happen, and they want to talk about anything else,” said Jim. “This is the president of the United States. And he’s an embarrassment to the country, and we’re asked time and again to avert our eyes from it.”
Jim stresses that “there are real consequences” to this mindset from the president. “Trump can’t tell the difference between good and bad. He could only determine ‘Is this person nice to me or is this person critical of me?’ And that, I suspect, is a figure of why he bends over backwards and is endlessly patient with Vladimir Putin and why he’s constantly talking about how well he gets along with Xi Jinping while he has this endless scorn for every democratic leader in Europe other than Orbán, right? . . .
“This is the president who is getting older,” says Jim. “He’s now as old as Biden was in May 2022. He’s not gonna get saner from here on out. He’s not gonna get more rational. This is the guy we’re stuck with for the next three years, and it’s gonna get worse before he leaves office.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.