What exactly did Rob Reiner publicly say about the 2024 attempt on Donald Trump’s life?
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Executive summary
Rob Reiner did not, based on available reporting, make any verified public statement endorsing or celebrating the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump; fact‑checks report no evidence he said the shooter “hadn’t missed” or “too bad he turned his head” [1] [2]. What is documented is a long history of Reiner’s outspoken criticism of Trump’s politics and rhetoric, which social media users later exploited to attach fabricated quotes to his name after Reiner’s death [3] [4] [2].
1. Direct answer: no verified quote endorsing violence
Multiple fact‑checks concluded that claims attributing celebratory or wishful comments about the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting to Reiner are unfounded; Snopes searched contemporary coverage and could not find evidence Reiner publicly wished the shooter had succeeded or uttered “Too bad he turned his head” regarding the July 2024 assassination attempt [1] [2]. Commentary in conservative outlets and social posts that repeated those lines after Reiner’s death rely on unverified images or recycled memes rather than contemporaneous reporting [2] [5].
2. What Reiner did say about Trump (context that seeded the misattributions)
Reiner was an ardent critic of Donald Trump and repeatedly described him in harsh terms in public interviews: he called Trump a “criminal,” accused him of lying constantly, warned that a second Trump term could turn the U.S. toward autocracy, and compared the choice in 2024 as between “democracy” and “fascism” — remarks documented in interviews with outlets like The Guardian, Variety and other profiles [3] [6] [4]. Those forceful, moralistic condemnations provide context for why anonymous social posts later tried to graft violent sentiments to him, even though those violent quotes lack sourcing [4] [2].
3. The anatomy of the misinformation: timing and motive
The false attributions surfaced broadly after Reiner and his wife were found dead in December 2025, when emotionally charged public reaction and partisan incentives pushed rapid sharing of inflammatory images and captions; Snopes traced widely circulated posts and found no contemporaneous source for the assassination‑related quotes, noting that similar unfounded lines had been previously flagged online [2] [1]. Political actors and commentators have incentives to amplify or debunk such claims depending on their agendas: opponents of Reiner’s politics use alleged violent statements to discredit him, while his allies emphasize his documented condemnations of violence to resist that framing [5] [7].
4. One verified thread: Reiner’s position on forgiveness and political violence
On at least one occasion Reiner spoke about forgiveness in the aftermath of political violence — he praised the wife of Charlie Kirk for forgiving her husband’s killer — and explicitly stated that forgiveness was admirable, showing he publicly acknowledged the moral complexity of political violence and victims’ responses [8] [6]. This documented stance complicates simplistic claims that he celebrated or condoned assassination attempts; it is part of the verified record that undermines later attributions of enthusiasm for violence [8].
5. How reputable outlets treated the question and the lingering uncertainty
Major outlets and fact‑checkers — Snopes, Newsweek, The Guardian, Time, PBS, Axios and others — report Reiner’s extensive anti‑Trump commentary but uniformly note the lack of evidence for any contemporary quote praising the Butler shooting itself; conservative and partisan pieces sometimes assert he “made no public comment” about the Butler attempt, while mainstream reports emphasize the absence of sourced remarks and the spread of viral misquotes after his death [1] [2] [5] [6]. Because reporting cannot prove a negative beyond available archives, this answer relies on published searches and fact‑checks showing no verified statement by Reiner endorsing the 2024 attempt [1] [2].
6. Bottom line and what remains unproven
The verifiable record shows Rob Reiner was a fierce, moralistic critic of Donald Trump and that inflammatory quotes about the Butler assassination attempt attributed to him circulated without sourcing after his death; however, journalists and fact‑checkers have found no contemporaneous, attributable remark from Reiner endorsing or celebrating the attack, and therefore such attributions should be treated as unfounded absent new, verifiable evidence [3] [1] [2].