Republicans Are Mad About Trump’s Awful Rob Reiner Post. Something Is Changing Here.

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Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party has survived countless political setbacks, a global pandemic, and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. It will survive his ugly Monday morning social media post about the death of Rob Reiner too. However, the immediate backlash to that post, in which Trump suggested that the Hollywood director had somehow brought death upon himself due to his disdain for the president, illustrates just how much that grip has slackened.

So far, in the intervening hours, congressional Republicans and other figures on the right have taken to the internet, without being prompted, to criticize Trump. The critics aren’t just swing-district Republicans, like Rep. Mike Lawler, of New York, or Trump adversaries, like libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie, of Kentucky. Instead, even an otherwise loyal Republican, Rep. Stephanie Bice, of Oklahoma, has chastised the president for the post. “A father and mother were murdered at the hands of their troubled son. We should be lifting the family up in prayer, not making this about politics,” wrote Bice on Twitter.

It’s not a full-scale rebuke of Trump by any means. But after years of hearing Republican members of Congress insist “I haven’t seen the tweet” to avoid commenting on the president’s latest post, the proactive engagement is notable.

As one longtime party operative, granted anonymity in order to speak frankly, pointed out to Slate: “Trump rules by fear.” And people are a lot less afraid of Trump—and the political ramifications of challenging him—now than they were months or even weeks ago. In particular, the operative highlighted the president’s failure to rally Indiana state senators to vote to gerrymander the state last week, a failed bid to deny Democrats representation in the state’s delegation.

It wasn’t simply that Trump lost the vote in the state Senate. It was that a majority of the Republicans in that chamber voted against him—even despite threats of primary challenges and political retribution from the president and his allies.

Further, as another veteran Republican politico mentioned, Trump is not yet a lame duck, but he’s getting there. “People are looking at what’s next,” said the politico.

At the same time, while the GOP may still be wary of challenging the president on issues where he is popular, there is not a strong constituency for dancing on Rob Reiner’s grave. Particularly in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and coming after a weekend that saw a mass shooting at Brown University and a terrorist attack on Bondi Beach in Australia, there’s little appetite for bloodlust save among the sycophantic pro-Trump online influencers.

This means that politicians pushing back on Trump’s post are likely to face far fewer consequences than what they’d experience from challenging the president on any other priority. After all, whereas millions of Republican primary voters believe that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from Trump, their credulity does not extend so far as to accept that the 78-year-old man’s criticism of the president somehow led to his killing.

The combination of all of these circumstances has meant that Republicans slowly but surely are dipping their toes into the water to reproach Trump.

Donald Trump isn’t going away anytime soon. His endorsement is still tantamount to near-automatic victory in a Republican primary, and he will still control all the levers of power in the federal government for the next three years.

But it’s clear he is slowly but surely diminished as his approval ratings approach all-time lows, and as Democrats have so far overperformed in almost every election held during his second term.

The result is that Republicans are less willing to excuse the inexcusable, like his post about Reiner. Even if he’s still an incumbent popular among the GOP faithful, Trump is no longer the political juggernaut he was only months ago.

Certainly, with his doubling down on his comments from the Oval Office on Monday afternoon, calling the deceased director “a deranged person,” he’s not making it any easier for Republicans to ignore this.