Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Donald Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.

Markets will not be moved, or brigades redeployed, or history shifted, because Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death Sunday in their home in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son Nick.

But this is an appalling human tragedy and a terrible national loss. Reiner’s movies, including “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally…,” are landmarks in the inner lives of millions of people; I can still quote by heart dialogue and song lyrics from his 1984 classic, “This Is Spinal Tap.” Until last week, he and Michele remained creative forces as well as one of Hollywood’s great real-life love stories. Their liberal politics, though mostly not my own, were honorable and sincere.

To which our ogre in chief had this to say on social media:

“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!”

I quote Trump’s post in full not only because it must be read to be believed, but also because it captures the combination of preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite that “deranged” the Reiners and so many other Americans trying to hold on to a sense of national decency. Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds.

That is where history will record that the deepest damage by the Trump presidency was done. There is, as Adam Smith said, “a great deal of ruin in a nation,” by which he meant that there are things in almost any country that are going badly wrong but can still be mended. Foolishly imposed tariffs can be repealed. Hastily cut funding can be restored. Ill-thought-out national security strategies can be rewritten. Shaken trust can be rebuilt between Washington and our allies.

But the damage that cuts deepest is never financial, legal or institutional. As one of Smith’s greatest contemporaries, Edmund Burke, knew, it lies in something softer and less tangible but also more important: manners. “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us,” Burke wrote. It is, he warned, through manners that laws are either made or unmade, upheld or corrupted.

Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every Cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized.

I wonder if we are ever getting them back — and if so, what will it take. As Trump was unloading on Reiner, James Woods, probably the most outspoken Trump supporter in Hollywood, lovingly remembered Reiner as a “godsend in my life” who saved his acting career when it was at a low point 30 years ago.

“I think Rob Reiner is a great patriot,” Woods said Monday on Fox News. “Do I agree with some of, or many of, his ideas on how that patriotism should be enacted, to celebrate the America that we both love? No. But he doesn’t agree with me either, but he also respects my patriotism.” Woods is right, but how that spirit of mutual respect and good faith can be revived under a man like Trump is a question he and the rest of the president’s supporters might helpfully ask of themselves.

The Reiner murders took place on the same weekend that an assailant, still at large, murdered two students at Brown University, and when an antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney gave every Jew in America a pit-of-our-stomachs sense that something like it may soon happen here again, as it did in Pittsburgh seven years ago. It’s been only three months since Charlie Kirk was shot in cold blood in Utah, and barely a year since health care executive Brian Thompson was murdered in Manhattan by an alleged assailant who is now a folk hero to the deranged reaches of the left.

This is not a country on the cusp of its “Golden Age,” to quote the president, except in the sense that gold futures are near a record high as a hedge against inflation. It’s a country that feels like a train coming off the rails, led by a driver whose own derangement was again laid bare in that contemptible assault on the Reiners, may their memories be for a blessing.

Happy Hanukkah, I guess.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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“What a decade this year has been.” That’s how a friend in Washington described 2025 to me. The last 12 months saw a flurry of activity as Republicans in the White House and Congress worked to enact President Donald Trump’s agenda before he reaches “lame duck” status. The result was a swirling mix of policy highs and lows that — without question — has rearranged the policy table heading into 2026.

First, the highs. The Southern border is secure: Border crossings have dropped to their lowest in recent memory, quite the change from the record highs of the Biden administration.  Trump campaigned on sealing the border and, by all practical measures, he has done it. That’s good.

Another high: Within days of reaching the Oval Office, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate 10 regulations for each new rule added.

That’s again in sharp contrast to his predecessor. The Biden administration had run a freight train of regulation right through the heart of the economy. In 2024, the last year of Biden’s presidency, agencies added 3,248 new final regulations — the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 42 minutes, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The 2024 Federal Register reached an all-time record of 107,261 pages. Good night.

Although regulation can be beneficial to protect consumers or the environment, too much is an economic chokehold. Even progressive pundits know this; regulatory restraint is a central tenet of the left’s new “abundance agenda.” We won’t have 2025’s numbers until the new year, but even if the Trump administration just holds the number of regulations constant, that would mark an improvement.

Then there’s the underreported financial relief given to working families as part of the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed this summer. That includes tax credits to companies that offer paid leave and child care, a 10% bump in the Child Tax Credit, $1,000 Trump Accounts for babies born between 2025-2028, and increased child-care vouchers to families in the form of the Child and Dependent Tax Credit.

To round out the highs and transition to the lows, we come to the shakeup of government. From the Department of Government Efficiency to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s focus on children’s health to historic peace deals, there’s been an appetite to try new things, to break up the staleness. One has to admire the energy; it’s reminiscent of big things in America’s past from the Homestead Act to the New Deal.

It’s too bad this energy was often erratically applied. DOGE was a wrecking ball through our civil service without much rhyme or reason (or savings). Health and Human Services raised very good inquiries into children’s health such as exposure to additives and chemicals and screen time, but also questioned age-old vaccines and oversaw a resurgence of childhood diseases like measles. The White House led a much-celebrated peace agreement in the Middle East, but failed to negotiate a deal between Russia and Ukraine and now faces scrutiny over US attacks on Venezuelan boats.

Some may argue that we can’t have big energy without crushing a few bystanders. I’m not sure that’s true.

Which brings us to the policy lows. People voted for Trump for many reasons, but mostly because they were sick and tired of Bidenomics and a weak economy. They thought they were voting “affordability” and limited government back into the White House.

Instead, the administration raised tariff levels to heights not seen in the better part of a century. Sure enough, costs of the tariffed goods rose — as any economist in their right mind could have predicted. This was an unforced error. Consumer sentiment keeps dropping and the labor market is slowing.

The federal debt remains a heavy Santa sack of unfunded goodies. We are borrowing on average $7 billion a day, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Much of this spending is driven by old-age entitlements, but the Trump tax package added a cool $4.1 trillion to the pile over 10 years by cutting tax revenue without an accompanying reduction in spending.

Yes, DOGE saved a few dollars and tariff revenue is surging. But that will barely even dent the debt trajectory. The US needs more fundamental reforms, like spending caps relative to GDP.

A stocking-stuffer assortment of other concerns: The heavy-handed federal raids on immigrants. The pressure on civil servants to be card-carrying members of MAGA; isn’t partisanship what the GOP was criticizing the alleged Deep State for? A coarseness in political talk at the highest levels. Trump insiders using their position to enrich themselves.

And so we head into the holidays with a feeling of underlying instability. It’s hard, sometimes, to tell which way the snow globe is shaking. But shaking it undoubtedly is.

This year has been a decade, all right.

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Imagine that your child has been kidnapped and taken far away. That child is scared, and you can offer no comfort. You don’t know if your child is being tortured, abused or militarized, but you know that someone is trying to turn your child into someone else entirely. It’s a parent’s worst nightmare.

Imagine that trauma and then scale it up thousands of times, and you have the reality that Ukraine is living with today.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped from their families and communities, taken to Russia and Russian-held territories and forced into indoctrination camps, military training camps, the Russian adoption system and who knows where else.

Some have been tortured and sexually abused, while some have been forced to fight against Ukraine as child soldiers. At least two of these children, a 12-year-old girl named Misha and 16-year-old named Liza, ended up in a camp in North Korea.

These children are fed pro-Russian propaganda and forced to speak in Russian in a deliberate effort to deny their national identity. Their documents, histories and citizenship are being erased to wholly sever their ties to their families and nation. They are told lies about who they are and where they come from.

The facts are well documented, thanks to the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which uses satellite imagery and open-source intelligence methods to track these crimes.

Some children were taken after their parents were killed in Russian strikes or by Russian troops or were separated from families in occupied areas. Others were taken from Ukrainian orphanages and foster care and put up for adoption in Russia after their identities were falsified. Children who resist this Russification are labeled extremists or terrorists.

Russia has, in fact, been stealing Ukrainian children since it invaded Crimea in 2014. This is a war crime that is on the rise across the globe. If Russian leader Vladimir Putin can continue to do so with impunity, we can only expect more children and families will face this terrible fate.

Russia has committed many gross human rights violations against the Ukrainian people in this war and continues to ruthlessly assault civilians and critical infrastructure. But its attack on Ukraine’s children is particularly grotesque, as they are put through hell to stoke fear in Ukrainian society and used as tools in Russia’s attempt to extinguish the Ukrainian nation.

Ukrainian authorities have officially confirmed 9,221 cases of abduction and are actively reviewing thousands more, but experts investigating these crimes believe at least 35,000 children have been stolen so far. This doesn’t account for the 1.6 million Ukrainian children subjected to Russian “reprogramming” within Russian schools, camps and social institutions in occupied Ukraine, where children are taught to be ashamed of their Ukrainian roots.

HRL has so far identified at least 210 “reeducation” facilities, most managed by the Russian government and many that include military-style training. As HRL Executive Director Nathaniel Raymond testified, “Kids as young as 8 years old were dressed in gas masks and military uniforms, taught to assemble machine guns, and — in at least one instance — were taken to a camp where children assembled drones, rapid loaders for assault rifles and other devices for Russia’s military use.”

A Senate hearing on Dec. 3 detailed this large-scale and systemic abduction program, with powerful testimony from Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States and experts from organizations working to bring these children home.

Just one day after the hearing, the Trump administration released its new national security strategy, which presented Putin’s Russia in a very different light. Instead of calling out the threat Russia poses to stability and peace in Europe and beyond, this administration chastised Europe for viewing Russia as a threat.

President Donald Trump continues to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the lack of progress toward peace, while holding Russia, the only aggressor, wholly blameless. Trump has now formalized his warming relations with Russia and, in doing so, normalized Putin’s crimes.

In an interview with Politico, Trump shared his expectation that Russia would inevitably prevail, saying that “at some point, size will win, generally.” Just consider what it would mean for weaker countries, vulnerable populations, and, of course, children if we accept that premise.

The United States could play a positive role here instead, as Congress seems inclined to do. A bill introduced in December would designate Russia as a state sponsor of terror if it fails to return these kidnapped children, and another, the Abducted Ukrainian Children Recovery and Accountability Act, would provide ongoing support for investigation and accountability to address these crimes. Passing and implementing these laws could provide the information and pressure needed to end the nightmare these children are enduring.

Any agreement to end this war should require the unconditional return of all the children. If we pressure Ukraine to cede more territory, thousands will be trapped behind new borders with no hope of being returned.

If we do nothing but help rehabilitate Putin on the world stage, we are legitimizing Russia’s mass child kidnapping and abuse. Is that really the role we want our country to play in the world?

Elizabeth Shackelford is a senior adviser with the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She is also a distinguished lecturer with the Dickey Center at Dartmouth College. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”

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