Did Rob Reiner say too bad Trump's assassin missed?
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Executive summary
There is no credible reporting that Rob Reiner said “too bad Trump’s assassin missed”; on the contrary, multiple outlets document Reiner condemning political violence and praising forgiveness after the Charlie Kirk assassination, and the claim appears to be a mischaracterization amplified in partisan coverage [1] [2] [3].
1. What the allegation asks and why it matters
The user’s core question is binary — did Reiner utter a specific celebratory phrase about an assassination — but the underlying issue is broader: whether a prominent liberal voice publicly celebrated political violence and whether that claim has been used to justify or deflect criticism after his homicide; answering requires checking contemporaneous quotes and reliable reporting rather than social-media rumor mills [4] [5].
2. The record of what Rob Reiner actually said about Charlie Kirk
Reporting that has been checked shows Rob Reiner responded to Charlie Kirk’s assassination by condemning violence and praising Kirk’s widow for forgiving the killer, telling interviewer Piers Morgan he found Erika Kirk’s forgiveness “beautiful” and stressing that murder is not an acceptable political response, which is the opposite of celebrating an assassination [1] [2] [6].
3. How the “too bad” claim compares with documented quotes
No reputable news story in the assembled reporting attributes a line like “too bad Trump’s assassin missed” to Reiner; rather, outlets from Axios to the New York Times and BBC reconstruct him as publicly urging compassion and decrying political violence, while noting that his later brutal death became a focal point for partisan attacks [1] [4] [7].
4. How the false or misleading version circulated and who amplified it
After the Reiners’ deaths, President Trump posted an inflammatory message blaming Rob Reiner’s politics for the killings, and conservative outlets and social accounts recycled snippets and characterizations that framed Reiner as gleeful about earlier violence; fringe sites like The Gateway Pundit amplified hostile narratives even as mainstream outlets and many Republicans criticized Trump’s post as inappropriate and unsubstantiated [8] [4] [5].
5. Context: why this claim was politically useful and how reporting handled it
The mischaracterization served immediate political purposes: it allowed critics to argue Reiner’s past words justified Trump’s harsh response, while Trump’s critics and independent outlets highlighted that Reiner had condemned the earlier assassination and that Trump offered no evidence linking Reiner’s criticism to his murder; major outlets documented both the original quote of Reiner and the backlash to Trump’s post [3] [9] [4].
6. Limits of the public record and final judgment
Based on the assembled reporting, there is no credible evidence that Rob Reiner said “too bad Trump’s assassin missed”; every documented quote cited here shows him condemning political violence and praising forgiveness, and the contrary phrasing appears to be a partisan distortion amplified after his death — if further primary-source audio or video surfaces, that would need reexamination, but it is not present in the reviewed coverage [1] [2] [4].