Trump once again makes a fool of himself, claiming that the recent tragedy of Rob Reiner and his wife was brought on by Reiner daring to disagree with his policies.
The Spark retorts that those are big words from a man who had to issue about 1,500 pardons or commutations of sentence for the violent behavior of his own rabid followers on Jan 6th, 2021 – some of whom were convicted of deliberate insurrection. If anything, the numbers – and the courts – show that strongly agreeing with Trump may drive one to violent, insurrectionist behavior quicker than anything else.
As the Spark pointed out in a previous article, the Trump Administration quietly worked to scrub federal portals of a Justice Dept. study revealing that, for years, right-wing inspired violence has been much more prevalent in the U.S. than left-wing inspired violence.
“Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States,” says a very informative 2024 study that – until recently – had been on the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs website (ojp.gov).
“In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism,” adds the report, that can still be accessed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives old posts. “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.”
The study was first captured on the Justice Programs website on Sept. 13th, 2024, and quietly removed – or suppressed – by the Trump Administration around mid-Sept. 2025.
The report was quite clear in its findings, and remains a necessary assessment for an effective federal strategy against domestic violence.
“A recent threat assessment by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security concluded that domestic violent extremists are an acute threat,” continued the eye-opening study, “and highlighted a probability that COVID-19 pandemic-related stressors, long-standing ideological grievances related to immigration, and narratives surrounding electoral fraud will continue to serve as a justification for violent actions.”
Careful readers will note that the threat assessment provides examples that better match Trump supporters than any other group. And unlike Trump’s ignorant guess, this assessment is based on cold, hard evidence.
If we would take Trump’s presumption seriously, we’d have to believe that a sizable majority of the American public is performing violence on its own family members, since they also openly disagree with Trump’s policies.
“The most recent AP-NORC poll showed that just 36 percent of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s performance, whereas 61 percent disapprove,” according to an article from The Hill, released on Dec. 15th.
Yet over 60 percent of the population is not shooting or stabbing one another behind closed doors. The Reiner family tragedy stands out because of its rarity – indeed, precisely because it is not happening elsewhere.
Obama’s daughters praise the beliefs and integrity of their parents. Chelsea Clinton and Amy Carter praise their parents political activities, and at least one son of Socialist lawmaker Bernie Sanders often works for his father in the political arena. It is a reflection of the family dynamics in more than 60 percent of the U.S. population, who are routinely just as vocal in their opposition to Trump’s policies, which such things as social media and public demonstrations make clear.
Yet it’s almost impossible to find any of them killing family members. The extreme rarity of the acts reveal a clear truth; if indeed guilty, Reiner’s son acted out of a deeply personal, individual sickness, and not out of popular, widely held beliefs espoused by millions of thoughtful, well-informed and non-violent citizens.
History points out one similar instance in which a familial argument involving a famous individual led to death – and the murder was perpetrated by a right-wing, conservative, literalist Christian.
Marvin Gaye was a singer whose contributions to rock and soul music in the 1960s and 1970s are well-documented. Something of a comeback hit, called Sexual Healing, was released in 1982 and introduced him directly to early Generation X listeners.
In 1984, a heated argument between Marvin Gaye and his father – a staunchly Conservative preacher, who held a literalist interpretation of the Bible – ended up with the senior shooting his famous son to death. The argument was apparently over how the Conservative father should treat his wife, the famed singer’s mother. The father’s ideas stemmed – at least in part – from his Conservative ideas and literalist Biblical interpretations.
Yet no one jumped to the conclusion that social and religious conservatives kill or maim family members – precisely because it was also such a rare occurrence. Its rarity proved the individual nature of the act. In the 1980s, social and religious conservatives were as numerous as left-wing people are today – and the Gaye family was just about the only well-known one to suffer such an extreme action from a social and religious Conservative member.
The rare, individual nature of these acts reveal they stem from the rare, individual psychological problems of the perpetrators. And, the facts further reveal, people in the U.S. who are motivated by political concerns to acts of violence, usually perform them against political opponents than the members of one’s family. Lastly, for several years now, those resorting to political violence have usually been right wing-extremists. The facts are clear. And facts do matter.
