WHAT WAS "MENTAL ILLNESS?" The revulsion was universal, Rove said!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2025

Except on MS NOW: Last evening, what's left of the sitting American president continued his lifelong flight from the realm of accurate statement.

What makes this a "lifelong" flight? From way back in December 2016, we'll let The Guardian tell the tale about Trump Tower's extra floors:

White House North–is Trump Tower the new West Wing?

[...]

The 202-metre tower opened in 1983 and took four years to build, with the help of 200 undocumented Polish construction workers (Trump denied knowledge of their employment in a 1990 court case).

Trump’s penthouse lift goes up to floor 68, but the building only has 58 stories. Trump justifies the maths on the basis of the large atrium on the ground floor, but he has a habit of exaggerating the size of his constructions. The nearby Trump World Tower has 90 advertised floors, and 70 real ones.

The misstatements have always been the norm. At the New York Times, David Sanger visits (a few of) the crazy claims from last night's shouted address:

A Bellicose Trump Points Fingers in Defending His Record on the Economy

[...]

Mr. Trump argued he cut drug prices by 400, 500 or 600 percent, all mathematical impossibilities. He claimed that inflation had dropped significantly since he became president, without mentioning that in September, the last month for which the government has numbers, it had returned to 3 percent, exactly where it was on Mr. Biden’s last weeks in office. He argued that gasoline was now under $2.50 a gallon in much of the country; his own department of energy reports it was $2.90. And he claimed there were states where gas was $1.99; in fact, no state average gas price was that low, AAA reports.

He failed to mention that the latest unemployment numbers—which were boosted by government layoffs executed by his administration—showed the unemployment rate at 4.6 percent, the highest in four years...

And so on from there. Has no one tried to tell the president that you can't reduce some stated amount by more than 100 percent? Meanwhile, a respected cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reitman, tweeted that he was concerned by what he saw last night:

Doctor sounds alarm after Trump, 79, gives 'manic' address

So reported The Daily Beast, as you can see here (or here). 

Dr. Reitman is a long-time, highly coherent CNN medical analyst. "No one should be happy to see the president like this," he said in one of his tweets last night, and we agree with that. 

We agree with that! That said, our current set of reports concern the astonishing way the sitting president reacted to the murder of Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner at the start of the week—first in a bizarre Truth Social post, then in a live Q-and-A.

In this morning's Wall Street Journal, long-time Republican guru Karl Rove is looking ahead to possible political disaster for the GOP. Along the way, he mentions the president's reaction to that double murder—and he himself makes a statement which he surely thought was accurate.

Sleigh bells are standard at this time of year. Rove says he's hearing a different kind:

Alarm Bells Ring, Are You Listening?

[...]

On Monday Mr. Trump grabbed the national spotlight when he decided to make a self-absorbed Truth Social post trashing Rob Reiner after he and his wife were gruesomely murdered.

This was a Hollywood couple with typical liberal Hollywood political sentiments. So what? He was a beloved television star and gifted movie director. She was a talented photographer. Friends describe them as warm, big-hearted, caring and generous.

Mr. Trump’s comments were met with universal horror and revulsion. What the president said about the Reiners didn’t diminish them. It diminished him. The adage, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” is especially true when the subjects are a treasured elderly couple stabbed to death (allegedly) by their son.

Rove says the president's (astonishing) comments "were met with universal horror and revulsion." Plainly, he wasn't watching MS NOW this Monday night, where no such reaction occurred.

Fellow citizens, can we talk? Those of us in Blue America are plainly too dumb to notice, but an odd set of reactions has emanated from Blue America's cable news channel in the past several weeks.

First, MS NOW took a dive last week. The channel's performers took that dive when the sitting president, for two consecutive days, announced that Minnesota's roughly 100,000 Somali-Americans are just a bunch of "garbage" who need to be deported.

The president made those statements for two consecutive days. The "beloved colleagues" of MS NOW maintained a near-uniform silence about those poisonous sweeping assessments.

A person could imagine reason for that surprising group silence. This week, the president's astonishing reaction to the murder of the Reiners was indeed met with "universal revulsion"—everywhere except on MS NOW, where the employees uniformly looked away, saying nothing, all through Monday night.

Basically, only Rachel Maddow spoke about the president's astonishing conduct—and as we noted yesterday, this is the entirety of what our Blue nation's top genius said:

MADDOW (2/15/25): And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Really happy to have you here.

If things look a little bit different tonight, if the lighting seems different, if the background looks a little different, that's because I'm joining you from somewhere I almost never am. I'm in Los Angeles right now. I was here in L.A. last night—we had a big event at the Orpheum Theater in downtown L.A. with some of the people that helped us make my new podcast, Burn Order, which is about the decision to incarcerate Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the people who fought that decision, and the thriller, the investigative thriller, at the heart of that.

All six episodes of Burn Order are now out, the whole thing is out, everything's posted, free to listen to the whole series on any podcast app.

Here in L. A., there's a lot going on. There is honestly a lot of shock and anger from all sorts of different people—from people connected to show business and not—shock and anger about the murder of beloved actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife.

I will say also, a lot of just visceral revulsion about President Trump's ghoulish, really ugly, disgusting comments, sneering at Mr. Reiner's death, almost seeming to celebrate his murder.

In L.A., today is also the day that Donald Trump's deployment of National Guard troops to this city fell apart. The federalized National Guard troops were forced to leave L.A. today because of a federal court order, because what Trump did in deploying them here, according to a judge, was illegal. 

We're going to have more to come on both of those stories, and much more, tonight. But I want to start somewhere tonight that is much colder than it is here. Let's start in Minnesota, specifically about fifteen miles southwest of Minneapolis...

Maddow (possibly) seemed to say that there would be "more to come" about the president's "disgusting comments." But she never reported what the president had actually said, and she never returned to that topic at all—and from 6 o'clock right through to midnight, neither did anyone else. 

Weirdly, it was the silence about Minnesota's "garbage" pretty much all over again!

Full disclosure:

We don't expect the people who star on Blue America's corporate channel to discuss the possibility that the sitting president is in the grip of (what used to be known as) a serious "mental illness."

We don't expect the stars to do something like that. In our view, they aren't smart enough, or curious or independent enough, to be exploring such possibilities on their own. 

Also, there's a long-standing prohibition, within the mainstream press corps guild, about discussing public figures in terms of possible mental health issues or possible "mental illness." We don't expect the stars of MS NOW to bump up against basic guild dictates.

As we've noted, international medical entities seem to be moving away from the use of those terms—from the use of such terms as "mentally ill" or "mental illness." Long ago, the poobahs of the MSM agreed to a rule which forbids such discussions--and like many other rules, that rule was a very good rule until the time came when it wasn't.

We've long since reached the point where that time-honored rule is a hindrance to sane debate. We don't expect the stars of MS NOW to sacrifice their "good jobs at good [seven- or eight figure] pay" to light out for the territories and abandon that rule on their own.  

We don't expect them to endanger their "good jobs at good [seven- or eight-figure] pay" by dumping that rule on their own.

We don't expect them to do that! Also, we'd be shocked if the new president, Rebecca Kutler, decided that the time had come to discuss the possibility that the sitting president is battling a serious condition involving his (clinical) "mental health."

We'd be surprised if the boss was willing to dump the "don't talk about someone's mental health" rule. But when we see Blue America's beloved stars refusing to discuss the president's conduct at all, we find ourselves asking this:

But oh, what kind of journalism is this, which goes from bad to worse?

Has Kutler instructed the troops to avoid discussions of the president's endless astonishing conduct? We don't have the slightest idea—and as we close for today, let's be fair:

On Tuesday morning, Joe & Mika did discuss the president's astonishing comments, the day before, regarding last weekend's murders. In fact, they did so at great length. 

It seems there is no blanket prohibition against discussions like that. That said, also this:

At 4 o'clock on Monday afternoon, Nicolle Wallace and a group of four guests discussed what the president had said about the Reiner murders. 

At 4:05 p.m., at the start of her two-hour show, Wallace read the text of "the deranged [Truth Social] post" in which the president assailed the memory of the murdered Rob Reiner. A lengthy discussion followed.

We were struck by the approach taken by Wallace and her guests as they discussed the president's conduct.

On Deadline: White House, it went just as Rove has now said. The sitting president's astounding comments were indeed "met with horror and revulsion" on that MS NOW show.

From that point on, all through the night, MS NOW's stars averted their gaze from the president's conduct. What can possibly explain their own astounding behavior—their remarkable group silence?

Karl Rove described "universal revulsion" in the face of the president's comments. Plainly, he wasn't watching Blue America's "cable news" channel this past Monday night. 

Also, what did Wallace and her guests say about the president's conduct? To our eye, and to our ear, they seemed to take an unhelpful approach concerning a possible illness.

Tomorrow or Saturday: What exactly are we talking about if we're talking about an "illness?"