Swing District Republicans Suddenly Stand Up to Trump Over Rob Reiner

Republicans in key swing states are peeling away from Donald Trump amid national backlash over his remarks about Rob Reiner’s murder.

Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.

But Trump chose to make the Hollywood icons’ tragic and untimely deaths all about himself, suggesting Monday that the When Harry Met Sally ... director wouldn’t have been killed if he had supported the MAGA agenda.

Doing so has seemingly come at a cost to critical support ahead of an already contentious midterm election cycle, as at least two conservative figures from swing states condemn the president’s comments.

“A father and mother were murdered at the hands of their troubled son,” wrote Oklahoma Representative Stephanie Bice, responding directly to a screenshot of Trump’s vicious Truth Social post. “We should be lifting the family up in prayer, not making this about politics.”

New York Representative Mike Lawler—who is a part of a coalition of House Republicans fighting party leadership to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies—felt similarly.

“This statement is wrong,” Lawler wrote, commenting on the same screenshot. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”

The president’s remarks, in full, read:

“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.

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

FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly crippling the FBI’s counterintelligence capabilities, former bureau agents have told The Bulwark.

On Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office in February, she terminated the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in order to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” She also pared back the bureau’s enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, curbing investigations into alleged espionage. It’s probably not a coincidence that Patel failed to register under the FARA when he consulted for Qatar.

Under Patel’s leadership, 23 percent of the roughly 13,000 total FBI agents have been reassigned to work on immigration enforcement, which is not historically in the bureau’s purview. According to Democratic Senator Mark Warner, nearly 40 percent of agents in the FBI’s largest field offices have been made to work immigration cases. As a result, agents with expertise on foreign adversaries such as China, Iran, and Russia are now handling immigration cases on a rotating basis, according to former agents who left the bureau.

“It’s a disaster,” Robert Anderson, who ran FBI counterintelligence from 2012 to 2014, told The Bulwark. “I’m rooting for everybody because we’re all Americans, [but] Patel needs to wake up.”

As the FBI’s focus has shifted under Patel’s leadership, the House Intelligence Committee has put forth a bill that would place counterintelligence, including the FBI’s ranks of spy hunters, under the purview of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has previously been criticized as a “Russian asset.”

Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI special agent who also served as director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, told The Bulwark that putting DNI in charge could be “really dangerous.”

“You could be creating a domestic spy agency with even less transparency to the American public,” he said.

To former FBI agents, that proposal undermines years of work developing a wide range of counterintelligence tactics and networks. “It’s tragic. All our work is being destroyed,” Montoya said.

Even though spy hunting isn’t historically in the DNI’s purview, Gabbard initially seemed anxious to take the reins, claiming the FBI had become too “politicized.” Meanwhile, the bureau pushed back on the intelligence committee’s bill, exposing a power struggle between Patel and Gabbard.

In a statement to The Bulwark, DNI said that Gabbard now “supports the administration’s position, which is in opposition to the legislation.”

As technology becomes more advanced, the threats of foreign adversaries are only growing—and experts are concerned that Patel isn’t doing enough. “Patel is only paying lip service to the Chinese threat,” Montoya said.

X users are experiencing an entirely different reality from the one that is actually happening.

Grok, Elon Musk’s generative AI program attached to X, is apparently running cover for the president over disturbing comments he made related to the murder of famed Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner.

Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday, alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.

The motive for the gruesome killing is not clear. But in Donald Trump’s mind, the murder is all about him, and The Princess Bride director never would have died if he had shown support for the MAGA agenda.

“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,” Trump wrote in a chilling post on Truth Social that is still on the site.

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, 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,” he continued. “May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

But Grok is either not capable of spotting the current events fiasco or has been programmed to deliberately muffle the president’s remarks. When X users initially probed Grok about the veracity of Trump’s recent post, the chatbot blatantly lied.

“Based on searches of X and Truth Social, no such post exists from @DonaldJTrump,” Grok responded to one user. “The screenshot seems fabricated. Rob Reiner and his wife were tragically killed, but Trump hasn’t commented publicly on it.”

In a separate post, Grok doubled down, informing users that it had “double-checked Trump’s accounts on X and Truth Social” and found that “no posts about Rob Reiner or his wife exist.”

“The screenshot is fabricated,” Grok wrote.

The chatbot eventually changed its mind—though only after Trump’s comments were widely reported by national media outlets.

Right-wing figures, including many supporters of the president, are condemning Donald Trump’s deranged Truth Social post attacking Rob Reiner following his and his wife’s tragic killing.

Trump claimed that Reiner and his wife’s deaths were “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,” a comment that many conservatives are rightfully calling insensitive and disrespectful.

Some of the president’s supporters replied to his post calling out his insensitive comments and telling him now was not the time to settle a political score.

Right-wing commentators Raheem Kassam, Robby Starbuck, and Rod Dreher—all of whom have supported Trump—were also disappointed in his comments.

Other conservatives who have taken a stand against Trump in recent months were equally outraged. Representative Thomas Massie, a libertarian critic of the president, called Trump’s post “inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered.”

One of Trump’s biggest supporters turned critics, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, pointed out Rob’s son Nick struggled with drug addiction, calling out Trump for making a “family tragedy” about politics and political enemies.

On Sunday night, Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet posted a video of Reiner’s comments following Charlie Kirk’s murder in September, in which Reiner said his gut reaction was “absolute horror.” Kolvet praised the Hollywood icon for responding “with grace and compassion to Charlie’s assassination.” Not even 12 hours later, Trump showed how much he is lacking in those two qualities.

President Trump’s inner circle is reportedly fuming at Republican Senator Josh Hawley for starting a new anti-abortion dark-money group with his wife in an effort to reignite political discourse on the issue—one the GOP expects to lose in the upcoming midterms.

Hawley hopes the group, called the Love Life Initiative, will be a “strong voice advocating for life.” Trump’s team begs to differ.

“Clearly, Senator Hawley and his political team learned nothing from the 2022 elections, when the SCOTUS abortion ruling [that reversed Roe v. Wade] resuscitated the Democrats in the midterms,” an anonymous adviser told Axios. They went on to argue that what they see as positive economic growth should be the theme for the midterms instead. “Picking a fight on an issue like abortion in a midterm is the height of asinine stupidity.”

This rift also comes amid monthslong rumors of Hawley’s potential presidential aspirations in 2028, as he could challenge Vice President JD Vance to rip the GOP away from the MAGA wing post-Trump.