Rob Reiner, and early television

The noted film director and actor Rob Reiner was interviewed on 60 Minutes Sunday night.  He talked about his life and career, and his new film, Spinal Tap II, a sequel to the original Spinal Tap movie, which was released in 1984, and was the first film he directed. He later directed such movies as A Few Good Men, The American President, When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, and Stand By Me.

Mr. Reiner, who is 78, was also interviewed in the September/October issue of the AARP Bulletin.  He was asked about his father, Carl Reiner, who had a long and distinguished show business career--as an actor, comedian, writer, and director. He created television's Dick Van Dyke Show--and, memorably, acted on the show, as TV star Alan Brady. He also appeared as a performer in early television--which included his starring role on Your Show of Shows, which aired Saturday nights on NBC, from 1950 until 1954.

Rob Reiner said this, in the AARP interview, about early TV: "Oddly enough, my father was on television before we had a television.  We bought one in 1951 so we could see him on Saturday nights." 

I have no doubt this was true of many television performers of the era--that they may not have had a TV set when they began performing in the new medium.

In 1949, my mother was living with her parents; she had graduated from college in 1948.  She had appeared in a Broadway music and comedy revue, Small Wonder, from the fall of 1948 until the show closed in January of 1949. Soon after, she began singing on The Stan Shaw Show, a weekday musical program on TV's DuMont Network; she sang on the show until early March, when the program left the air. From March until July, she sang on a weeknight musical show on the network, Teen Time Tunes, with the musical group The Alan Logan Trio.  Shortly after Teen Time Tunes began airing, she turned twenty-one. 

Her family, at the time, didn't own a TV set, and so my grandparents would go to Macy's, in New York City, to watch her on the store's demonstration models. 

Early in the year, my parents had met at a party, and began dating; they would marry in August of 1949.  My father was in his medical residency at the time, and he didn't have a TV set either. In order to see my mother sing on Teen Time Tunes, he would often go to the DuMont Network studio on Madison Avenue, and (while there was no studio audience for the program) would watch the show in person.

The indictment of James Comey

One of the most striking things I have learned, since the beginning of the second Trump presidency, appeared in a March 2025 online story in The Atlantic, by the writer Peter Wehner.  Mr. Wehner worked in the administrations of three Republican Presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.  

His March piece in The Atlantic was titled: "Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable."

Mr. Wehner wrote, in his piece, that Trump's desire for vengeance is nothing new--that it goes back decades:

Revenge has long been a central theme for Donald Trump. In a 1992 interview with the journalist Charlie Rose, Trump was asked if he had regrets. Among them, he told Rose, “I would have wiped the floor with the guys who weren’t loyal, which I will now do. I love getting even with people.” When Rose interjected, “Slow up. You love getting even with people?” Trump replied, “Absolutely.”

Here is the video of the interview with Charlie Rose. The above comments appear at approximately 41 minutes from the video's start.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QQqioef19k

Here, too, is the link to Mr. Wehner's piece in the March 20, 2025 Atlantic:

 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/political-enemy-retribution-efforts/682095/?gift=Tcay7nmVziC9n3Jf9Qllm6NqcjM7ax8BygQt0VIicMI&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

As Mr. Wehner noted, at the outset of his Atlantic piece, Trump famously said the following, during his last campaign for the presidency:  "For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution." 

While on the first day of his second presidency, in 2025, Trump set free all of those convicted of, or charged with, crimes related to the events of January 6, 2021, including those convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers on that day--some 140 officers were injured at the Capitol on January 6th--his primary interest, regarding retribution, clearly concerns himself.  

And now, there has been the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.  

As The Washington Post reported on Thursday:

The case against Comey marks the most significant step to date in Trump’s campaign to deploy the Justice Department to avenge personal grievances and prosecute those he perceives as his enemies. The president’s demands during the weekend that Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly charge Comey and others flew in the face of long-standing norms meant to shield the Justice Department from direct political interference from the White House.

Last week, the White House forced out the previous top prosecutor on the case after he declined to seek an indictment and replaced him with one of Trump’s former personal attorneys.

That successor, Lindsey Halligan — now interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — personally presented the case against Comey to the grand jury on Thursday, said two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Before she was sworn in Monday, Halligan had no prosecutorial experience.

Trump claimed today that the indictment of Mr. Comey was "about justice, really. It's not revenge."

Yet, as The Washington Post story on Thursday noted, attorneys for Comey are "likely to point to the fact that before Thursday’s indictment the case had been rejected by Erik S. Siebert, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney who had been overseeing the investigation. He concluded there was insufficient evidence to move forward with a prosecution, The Post has reported."

The Post story continued:

Siebert resigned last week under intense pressure from the Trump administration, in part because of that decision. Trump appointed Halligan as his replacement because, the president said, she would “get things moving.”

Since Halligan was sworn in Monday, several attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia shared a memo with her laying out concerns with the strength of the evidence, two people familiar with that meeting said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about those internal deliberations. Nevertheless, Halligan opted to move forward.

Jimmy Kimmel

I am sure there are people--perhaps many--who might feel that the suspension, and potential firing, of television host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel, was not a big deal.  

It has in fact been a very big deal--and so one felt, really, a sense of relief watching his return to his ABC show last night. His monologue, at the program's outset, was terrific--impressive, funny, and affecting.

PA Governor Josh Shapiro on political violence, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk

The headline of a story, online, from today's Philadelphia Inquirer: 

"Josh Shapiro says Donald Trump should learn to manage political violence by looking to Pennsylvania"

Governor Shapiro, the Inquirer reported,

criticized Trump and his allies for responding to the Kirk shooting with calls for vengeance and cherry-picking which instances of violence to condemn, in turn raising the political temperature.

“I don’t care if it’s coming from the left or the right, we need to be universal in our condemnation, and the president has once again failed that leadership test, failed the morality test, and it makes us all less safe,” Shapiro argued.

https://share.inquirer.com/54oS4F

Twenty-four years ago today

This photograph is the second in a sequence of four pictures taken the morning of September 11, 2001, by photographer Robert Clark. The image shows United Flight 175, just before it crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, at 9:03 a.m.  American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m.

Please click on the image, to enlarge it.

The image above, with the three accompanying images, appeared in a special edition of Life magazine in November of 2001.  The sequence of images had originally appeared in Time magazine, in the days after September 11th.

The four pictures can be seen at the following Internet Archive link, which shows the full Time magazine issue from September 2001. Navigation arrows allow one to scroll through spreads of the magazine's pages. The two pages of photos by Mr. Clark appear alongside an introductory two-page spread (featuring a photograph by Gulnara Samoilova); both spreads are preceded by the image of the magazine's cover.

https://archive.org/details/time-magazine-september-11-2001-2001-09-14-red/page/n1/mode/2up

(Image above, and four images at Internet Archive © Robert Clark/Aurora Photos, and Time, Inc.; additional image in Time issue © Gulnara Samoilova, and Associated Press. )

Trump, on Wednesday: "Really, I think it's enough."

Today, several of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell) spoke, movingly, in front of the U.S. Capitol.  They addressed the traumas inflicted upon them, years ago, and urged the House of Representatives to support the release of the Department of Justice's files concerning the Epstein case.

Yet, as The New York Times noted:

Even as Mr. Epstein’s accusers spoke at the Capitol, some of them growing emotional as they recounted their experiences, Mr. Trump at the White House dismissed the effort to get more files released as a “Democrat hoax that never ends.” 

President Trump has used the word "hoax" regularly, when talking about the Epstein case.  

He said on Wednesday that "thousands of pages" from the files have been released.

Some 33,000 documents were released by the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday--a fraction of the files held by the U.S. Justice Department. 

Reuters reported today: "The files released on Tuesday largely included court documents and other previously released information."

A story in today's Washington Post said the following:

Trump has spent weeks expressing exasperation about the bipartisan uproar over the Epstein case, suggesting some members of his party are being used by Democrats for political advantage.

“They’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president,” Trump told reporters during an Oval Office meeting with Polish President Karol Nawrocki.

“I know that no matter what you do, it’s going to keep going,” Trump later added. “Really, I think it’s enough."

In early July, of course, the Trump Justice Department announced that there was, in fact, no Epstein "client list," that Epstein had committed suicide (contradicting theories he had been murdered), and that "no further disclosure [about the Epstein case] would be appropriate or warranted."

There was immediate anger from many of Trump's prominent right-wing supporters. 

Trump sought to deflect blame from himself, and his administration.  He blamed Democrats.   He called supporters who demanded more information about the Epstein case "stupid" and "foolish."

In a July 16th post on his Truth Social platform, he called such supporters "weaklings," who had "bought into this 'bullshit,' hook, line, and sinker." He said: "I don't want their support anymore!"

In a lengthy July 12th Truth Social post, Trump ranted about the Epstein issue, and referred to his "PERFECT administration."

What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands.

He also wrote (referring--twice--to the "Rigged and Stolen" 2020 election): 

The Left is imploding! Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 — That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more. One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.

Over the past many weeks, Trump has been asked often, by reporters, about the Epstein case; he has also, as noted above, written about the issue on social media. His comments have, routinely, been defensive, dismissive, and bitter. During this time, to my knowledge, he has never expressed any kind of sympathy toward the victims of Epstein and Maxwell.