Was any archived X/Twitter post by Rob Reiner found regarding the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting in 2024?

Checked on December 18, 2025
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Executive summary

A targeted review of contemporary fact-checking and archive reports finds no evidence that an archived X/Twitter post by Rob Reiner exists in which he commented that the would‑be assassin in the July 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania shooting “hadn’t missed” or similar; multiple fact‑checking outlets and archive reviews concluded the attribution is fabricated [1] [2] [3]. Independent reviewers examined Reiner’s former X account captures and news archives and turned up no such message, while the claim circulated on social platforms after Reiner’s death in December 2025 [1] [2] [3].

1. The core claim and how it spread — a social‑media echo, not an archival find

The allegation that Rob Reiner had posted on X that he wished the Butler attacker had “not missed” President Trump in July 2024 surfaced on social platforms in mid‑December 2025 and was amplified by partisan accounts and reposts, but it originated as an unverified image/text meme rather than a verifiable archived post; fact‑checkers documented the circulation and noted archives of the supposed message on X, Threads and Instagram [2] [1].

2. What archive checks actually found — no matching post in preserved captures

Researchers who reviewed archival captures of Reiner’s X account — including repositories such as the Internet Archive and archive.is — reported hundreds of preserved entries from his account but none containing the quoted message about the Butler shooting, and AFP explicitly notes that a review of those archived captures failed to find the post circulating after Reiner’s death [3]. Lead Stories likewise reported that keyword searches across news databases and archived social captures returned no corroborating evidence that Reiner made the alleged statement in 2024 [1] [4].

3. Authoritative fact‑checks and consensus — Snopes, Lead Stories, AFP

Snopes characterized the rumor as unfounded after reader inquiries and tracing the meme’s spread, explaining that Reiner’s public record showed opposition to political violence rather than endorsement of it; Lead Stories reached the same conclusion, finding no evidence Reiner ever said he wished the gunman had succeeded, and AFP confirmed archive reviews failed to turn up the cited post [2] [1] [3]. These organizations publicly documented both the absence of the post in archives and the presence of the fabricated claim in social feeds.

4. Context: Reiner’s public stance on political violence and the posthumous misinformation environment

Contemporaneous reporting establishes that Reiner was a vocal anti‑Trump activist and had criticized the former president in public forums, yet he also publicly condemned politically motivated violence on multiple occasions — a nuance cited by outlets reporting on the fabricated attribution — and the false post appears to have been weaponized amid heated discourse following Reiner’s death in December 2025 [5] [2] [6]. Major news outlets covering reactions to Reiner’s killing documented how rancorous political actors reused the fabricated content to justify or amplify partisan attacks [6] [7].

5. Caveats and limits of available evidence

The reporting reviewed is clear that archive searches and fact‑checks did not locate the alleged Reiner post; those sources also note that Reiner’s original X account was deleted around November 2024, which can complicate provenance checks, but the archival projects referenced still captured hundreds of prior posts and none matched the Butler‑shooting attribution [3] [1]. Given the sources provided, there is no verified archival record of the cited tweet; if additional primary archives or private captures exist beyond those reviewed by AFP, Snopes and Lead Stories, they were not cited in the reporting examined here [3] [1] [2].

Conclusion

Multiple independent fact‑checking organizations and archive reviewers examined the claim and concluded there is no evidence in archived captures of Rob Reiner’s X/Twitter account that he posted the alleged comment about the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania shooting; the statement is a fabricated attribution that circulated on social media after Reiner’s death and was amplified by partisan accounts and public figures [1] [2] [3] [6].

Want to dive deeper?
Which archives (Internet Archive, archive.is) captured Rob Reiner’s deleted X account and what do those captures contain?
How have fabricated social‑media posts been used in political attacks after high‑profile deaths in 2024–2025?
What standards and methods do fact‑checkers use to verify or debunk alleged historical social media posts?