After Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were stabbed to death, President Donald Trump went off on a social media tear denouncing Rob Reiner for supposedly having a “mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” Asked about the comment, Trump doubled down, saying that Reiner was “a deranged person” who “was very bad for our country.”
Trump seemed to blame Reiner for his own murder, saying that he drove people crazy and reportedly died “due to the anger he caused.” If that was meant as a reference to the arrest of the Reiners’ son Nick in connection with the killing, Laura Loomer, Trump’s far-right ally, made this explicit. She said of Rob Reiner: “Naturally, his son was also a loser, and he got addicted to drugs and allegedly murdered his parents.”
All this is so vile and graceless in the face of what may be the worst kind of family tragedy, a patricide and matricide. We yearn for leaders to unite us, to help us heal after tragedies, to offer a moral vision as well as a political agenda. Instead, Trump once again magnifies hatreds and divisions in the crassest way; he seems to exult in cruelty.
So by all means, let’s condemn the president’s dehumanizing language about the Reiners. But I hope we can also go a step further and work to reduce such tragedies.
Nick Reiner has struggled with addiction since he was a teenager. Our metric for addiction tends to be overdose deaths — more than 80,000 in the United States in 2024 — but the toll is far higher. It’s found in the ache in so many homes, among parents bewildered by a child’s self-destructiveness, as they toss about all night wondering what they did wrong, as they worry that the jangle of the phone will report an overdose, as they try to comprehend a descent into homelessness, prostitution or violence, as their fear for a child sometimes evolves into fear of a child. Addiction carves a vast river of pain through America.
That seems to have been the story of the Reiners. “We were desperate,” Rob Reiner once said of their efforts to help their son, who first went into rehab at around 15 and estimated that he had been through 18 bouts of rehab while still a teenager. One can only imagine the Reiners’ anguish as they saw him become homeless and repeatedly relapse.
Addiction shadowed the Reiners’ home and also Joe Biden’s. But mostly it haunts the powerless and invisible who often can’t get adequate help — and perhaps partly because it is so stigmatized, it doesn’t get the attention or remedies that are needed.
Trump has shown periodic interest in the toll of drugs in America and is spending millions of dollars on a vast military deployment in the Caribbean on the supposed basis that Venezuela is shipping fentanyl to the United States. (In fact, Venezuela ships mostly cocaine, not fentanyl, and the drugs go mostly to Europe rather than America.)
If Trump’s antidrug efforts were serious rather than performative, he would be expanding Medicaid and other initiatives that support treatment for people who use them. It should be a national scandal that fewer than one-fifth of Americans who need treatment for substance use disorder get it.
I’ve written about the best drug treatment program I know of, called Women in Recovery, in Tulsa, Oklahoma; it should be scaled up for men and women alike across the country.
Treatment is imperfect, as Nick Reiner’s journey shows, for his family had resources to get him help but struggled to tug him from the vortex of drugs. I’ve also known many people whose lives were saved by treatment. Two of those were people who I think were capable of murder when they were high and strung out.
Seriousness about addiction would also entail addressing the underlying causes that lead people to self-medicate with drugs. That means starting with young children and addressing traumas, getting kids through school and on a path to college or a trade.
Why am I so passionate about this issue? Because my hometown in rural Oregon saw factories and sawmills close and meth arrive — and so many families have been bathed in pain since. By this year, one-third of the kids who rode with me on the No. 6 school bus in Yamhill, Oregon, are gone from drugs, alcohol or suicide. Two died on the streets while homeless. Several committed brutal crimes. One neighbor regularly let her drug dealer rape her seventh-grade daughter in exchange for meth.
After I wrote books about this neglected miasma of suffering, strangers would approach me and confide in whispers that their son was homeless or their daughter was in prison. This is a national trauma that we Americans have never adequately confronted.
If you’re looking for a way to step up, here’s another idea. Every year I have a holiday giving guide recommending several nonprofits that I deeply admire for their effectiveness. This year, one of the nonprofits I recommend is Vision to Learn, working here in the United States to get glasses in the hands of low-income children so that they can see, do schoolwork and succeed. Without glasses, they too often become disruptive troublemakers on a downhill trajectory; studies find that glasses make an enormous difference in outcomes.
Getting kids glasses is not going to end the scourge of drugs in America, but it can transform the lives of some young children. It represents lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. If you want to join our effort, you can donate at KristofImpact.org, and all contributions will be matched.
Or there are other ways to step up, for there are thousands of good organizations building opportunity and trying to push back at the indifference. That feels far more constructive — even presidential — than heaping scorn on the grave of a murdered couple who, for all their fame and achievement, were just a heartsick mom and dad.
