What Makes MAGA's Response To Rob Reiner's Death So Hypocritical? Experts Say It Comes Down To This.

In the aftermath of the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner, the internet flooded with heartfelt messages of shared grief and support for the family.

Mostly.

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Over on Truth Social, the posting medium of choice for President Donald Trump, the tone was different.

“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,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Monday night.

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump,” Trump continued, “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!”

Insulting the victims of a domestic violence-related crime and somehow making the tragedy about his own victimhood didn’t resonate for many.

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Even some proud Trump voters stepped up on the Truth Social platform to critique the president’s “tacky” response to a family tragedy, calling it “heartless and uncalled for” and “unnecessary” to attack Reiner in that moment. Yet, as of this writing, his post still had 9.31k reposts and 38.9k likes. Although there have been some prominent Republican detractors, they were mostly individuals who were already on the outs with the president or had previously spoken against him.

Trump’s offensive message came after extensive discourse, fueled by the right in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, arguing that “insensitive critiques” of the dead (like sharing words they said aloud to a camera) were in poor taste, grounds for people to lose their jobs, and even akin to promoting political violence.

To gain a better understanding of how this seemingly hypocritical dynamic came to be, HuffPost spoke with psychologists about what causes individuals to condemn something vehemently one day, only to find themselves seemingly indifferent just a few months later.

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Why Would Anyone Post Like That? 

“It is no real surprise that Trump made it all about himself,” John Jost, co-director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University, told HuffPost. “That is what destructive narcissists do, people who exhibit what psychologists refer to as malevolent personality traits.”

“Trump also makes Freud relevant again,” Jost added. “Projection is an everyday occurrence. In this case, someone is deranged, but it’s not Rob Reiner.”

Daniel R. Stalder, a social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, told HuffPost that most people attempt to find and understand the “why” when processing a tragedy like this — even if information is limited in the immediate aftermath. And though there’s undoubtedly a political component to the messaging, Stalder said parts of Trump’s post do also seem to align with the psychology of victim blaming.

“In general, unfortunately, it’s relatively common to respond to tragedy by searching for and finding some reason to blame the victim(s) of the tragedy,” Stalder said. “There are psychological benefits to victim blaming — not that those benefits can excuse it.”

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Among those benefits are satisfying “one’s just-world beliefs and one’s need for control “because if we can identify something negative about the victim’s character that caused the outcome, then we might feel safer that the outcome won’t happen to us.”

Psychotherapist Gina Simmons Schneider said that the nature of online communication may also play a part in how easily we can dehumanize one another, as well as the normalization of this kind of posting.

“We also know that the more distant we feel from others, the easier it is to inflict harm. That’s why we see so much cruelty online,” Simmons Schneider said. “You might behave politely toward the person with opposing beliefs who happens to be sitting next to you on an airplane. Online, it’s easy to spew hate without seeing the direct social consequences of that abusive behavior.”

However, in the long run, reinforcing the hypocrisy can lead to a cognitive dissonance that can manifest via feelings of anxiety: “To resolve that internal conflict, we must either change our values or change our behavior to align with them,” Simmons Schneider said.

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The Extreme In-Group vs. Out-Group Dynamics That Got Us Here

Jay Van Bavel, director of the Center for Conflict & Cooperation at New York University, told HuffPost that while the dynamic we’re witnessing in the aftermath of Reiner’s death is upsetting, it’s one we’ve seen each time a partisan figure has died in recent years.

“Every time this happens, it gets worse,” Van Bavel said. “It seems to always reach a new low, if you track polarization in the U.S.”

This uptick in polarization may be linked to the advent of social media, which coincided with the backlash to the first Obama presidency, the Tea Party movement, and the 2008 economic crisis. But it’s also steadily risen as algorithms are fine-tuned to keep us enraged and engaged, and distrust in institutions – and one another – continues to grow.

“Part of it is empathy,” Van Bavel said. “There’s greater empathy for members of our own group when they suffer something bad.”

There might even be some evidence of pleasure (at least neurologically) from the in-group at the pain of the out-group, which is why we get the “political schadenfreude” so often on display.

Citing a paper that looked at the dynamics of baseball fans (Yankees vs. Red Sox, specifically), Van Bavel noted that there was some activation in parts of the brain that deal with pleasure when a member of “an out-group has something bad happen to them.” Add in the in-group, out-group dynamics we’re already familiar with, and it can make the “why” a little easier to understand: Each side is predisposed to cultivate more empathy and reserve more nuance for those they perceive as part of their group.

This means that their information ecosystems are also reinforcing the biases they already subscribe to.

“When we have strong identities, we’re motivated to believe things that bolster our identities,” Van Bavel said. ”People could believe stories, messaging and misinformation that, in this case, could mean Republicans are more likely to believe stories that make [Reiner] seem worse.”

To Be Clear, It Is Still A Big Deal When The President Posts Like This.

It’s very easy for the “both sides are bad, actually” stance to take hold when you acknowledge the biases both sides are prone to embracing. However, Jost noted that the Republican Party under Trump adopted a more “extremist” tenor that weighs heavily in this situation.

That’s why, Jost said, the “both sides are at fault” narratives don’t quite “pass the smell test,” given the track record among Trump’s supporters for excusing, embracing or celebrating the cartoonish disdain the president has shown political adversaries.

“When that is the case, hypocrisy and dishonesty is not a problem for one’s constituents, and democratic accountability to the people as a whole (much less the loyal opposition) is non-existent,” Jost said. “Dehumanization is commonplace, as is indifference to violence committed by one’s allies or against one’s adversaries.”

When that behavior is modeled so transparently from the top down, it’s something people on all sides notice. Van Bavel said that when someone who is considered one of the “elites” in an in-group — the figures who lead, command attention — participates in this sort of behavior, it can increase the odds that some of their followers will follow suit.

“People who follow politics closely tend to mirror the policies, positions and statements of their leaders — and Trump has an enormous influence over the core people who follow him,” Van Bavel said, noting that followers were more likely to rationalize his rhetoric or engage in the same kind of talk themselves when they see him do it.

Simmons Schneider also noted that “most people can be persuaded to hurt others when an authority figure encourages them to do so,” citing the work of Stanley Milgram from the 1960s that examined social conformity and obedience.

“Human history and psychological research have shown that ordinary good people can be made to commit unspeakable crimes by corrupt leaders,” she said. “Those with strong moral convictions and/or with personality traits of independence, creativity and nonconformity are more able to resist the corrupting influence of a cruel leader.”

How Do We Live With One Another? 

Ultimately, we do need to live in a society together, regardless of the in- and out-group status we’ve assigned ourselves and one another. But how are we supposed to pull that off?

For one, it’s worth knowing that you’re not alone in struggling with this. In her work as a psychotherapist, Simmons Schneider said she’s seen “a considerable uptick in anxiety disorders exacerbated by political conflicts within families.”

“People struggle with the cruelty of our politics while trying to reconcile a vision of themselves as good-natured,” she said. “It’s destructive to the collaborative spirit we yearn for in cooperative society.”

One thing Van Bavel recommended was to recognize the shared values that we all have as Americans. He also stressed the importance of constantly challenging the algorithms telling you that the “other side” hates you by remembering that the most vocal posting voices do not accurately represent the thoughts and feelings of your neighbors.

“The most incendiary, extreme voices do not represent the average member of the parties,” he said. “When you reveal that they don’t hate you as much as you think, that can be a really good way to help people calm down.”

While the most zealous individuals are the ones in the comment sections and firing off word count-defying posts, it helps to remember that most of the people you interact with (yes, even the ones on the other side) are probably just normies who aren’t keeping tabs on every communication tangentially related to partisan politics.

“Part of the issue is that political elites are more extreme than average voters. Even though Donald Trump might be saying it and elites may be echoing it, [average voters] might not agree with it privately — but those people don’t show up on social media,” Van Bavel said, citing the Pew Research Center stat that 10% of people are sharing 97% of the political posts. 

That’s also why it’s important to have an adult in the room who sets the tone of civility and offers a bit of harm reduction from the top down.

“When political leaders are signaling that it’s OK to do this, we are far more likely to do it,” Van Bavel said. “It’s really significant when someone like Donald Trump does this. It sends a signal that it’s acceptable to do this. When they signal that violence is acceptable, it can signal to some people that it is appropriate.”

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