First off, let me say that today, I mourn. I mourn for the death of Rob and Michele Reiner, for the unfathomable tragedy of a mentally troubled young man killing both of his parents in cold blood. I mourn because in ways both big and small, Rob Reiner made the world a better place. I mourn because there are few people on earth whose work made me belly laugh even when I was feeling down—and because now every time I watch an episode of All in the Family, or catch another screening of The Princess Bride, or When Harry Met Sally…, or Spinal Tap, I will know the infinite cruelty of the ending.

I mourn, too, for the beyond-gross way in which Donald Trump, the public face of America, responded to this awful event—and for what it says about where this country is right now.

If you are the president of the United States, it’s really not very hard to say the right thing in response to such a tragedy. Even if you didn’t personally like the victims, you can say something generic about how you send condolences to the family, how your thoughts and prayers are with the victims, how you hope that in this moment we can put politics aside and grieve as a nation for the loss of a cultural icon.

And yet, in his malignant senescence, Trump flubbed it. Astoundingly, he took to Truth Social to post that Reiner’s murder was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights.… May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

When, hours later, journalists gave Trump a chance to walk back this ghastly statement, he doubled down. “Well, I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person. I thought he was very bad for our country,” he sneered.

I have written literally hundreds of columns over the years on Trump, and in many of those I have explored how his language, his tone, is overtly fascist. In his dehumanization of his political opponents, even after their murders, we are, indeed, seeing the quintessential fascist bloodlust in play. But, really, this is more akin to the mad Roman emperor Caligula; this is the language of a man fed equal parts lead and mother’s milk as an infant and then told by every be-toga’ed body of sycophantic elites that he is a deity whose every mad impulse is actually part of a divine plan.

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Seriously, though, we are now witnessing a full-flowering malignancy on the American body politic. Every day, Trump is saying and doing things—attacking journalists, calling entire races of humans “garbage,” signing off on a national security strategy that urges America to help far-right nationalist parties seize power in Europe, demanding that commentators who write things he doesn’t like be tried for treason, mocking the murder of a political opponent—that would get most elementary school children first suspended and then, if they didn’t make a good-faith effort to shape up, expelled.

I can almost see the letter from the principal to Donald’s disappointed parents:

Dear Mr. and Mrs Trump,

It is with great reluctance that my colleagues and I have come to the conclusion that your son is no longer a good fit for our school. We are deeply concerned that he is demonstrating profoundly antisocial tendencies, and while we have repeatedly urged your family to seek professional help for your son, it appears that our suggestions have gone unheeded. The situation has, unfortunately, now reached a breaking point.

As you know, when Donald began insulting girls out on the schoolyard by calling them “piggy,” “stupid,” and “ugly,” we explained to him that this was not how a little boy is supposed to talk to other people. He responded sullenly and seemed particularly angered by the fact that it was one of his female teachers who tried to impart some manners.

Not long afterward, your son began lashing out at students of Somali-American heritage, going so far as to call all members of that group “garbage” and demanding that they leave the school and return to the “shit hole” country that their ancestors left. We hope you will agree that this is simply shocking language, and that a child of Donald’s age should know better than to talk about other human beings in this disparaging way. He has, after all, been at school for six years by now, more than enough time to learn that talking like this is unacceptable.

Our dismay at Donald’s crude language has, however, recently morphed into a more active concern for the safety of his fellow pupils and our staff. When the school counselor tried to suggest that he might benefit from some anger management counseling, Donald lashed out in an objectively intimidating manner. In a long, meandering social media post—apparently written in the middle of the night—that was flagged and referred to local law enforcement, he declared that anyone who dared to question his emotional or physical well-being ought to be tried for sedition and treason; he also let it be known that in the olden days the penalty for such crimes was death.

That was followed up by what can only be described as a poisonous response to a homework assignment asking how America should interact with its closest political allies. Donald’s 29-page answer was, we are sorry to say, one of the most racist texts we have ever read from a child of his age. Donald urged America to ally with fascist parties throughout Europe to “save Western civilization from erasure,” declared that America’s enormous military might should now be turned against immigrants, and sided with extremist Christian nationalists who do not respect the separation of church and state that is a fundamental part of the United States’s identity. Worried about what sorts of materials Donald was reading online, we referred the text to our district headquarters; the district replied that it was deeply alarmed that Donald was accessing extremist websites and pointed out numerous sentences that could have been lifted whole-cloth from Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik’s “manifesto,” penned shortly before he killed 77 teenagers at a political summer camp.

The last straw, however, was your son’s extraordinarily callous response to the recent murder of cultural icon Rob Reiner. Three months ago, when the far-right activist Charlie Kirk was gunned down, Donald’s classmate little Stevie Miller made a fiery speech quite literally calling down the wrath of God on anyone who didn’t mourn the killing vociferously enough. Stevie and Donald joined together to attack other students who they deemed insufficiently upset by the murder, even demanding that some of the teachers in this school be fired. We didn’t like how Stevie and Donald acted, but we understood their impulse: someone had been killed, and they wanted everyone to say that that was a bad thing.

Today, however, when news broke that Rob Reiner had been stabbed to death, many students, who can quote large parts of The Princess Bride from memory, were heartbroken. We expected Donald to show the same concern about Reiner’s murder that he had shown for Charlie Kirk. Instead, we discovered to our horror that he had gone onto his Truth Social account immediately after he heard the news and penned a vicious screed mocking the killing and saying it had been caused by Reiner’s dislike of Donald. In fact, in a stunningly narcissistic display, your son announced to the world that Reiner had been killed because his “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” had driven others to anger. This was both bizarrely illogical and also deeply offensive to many members of our community.

We trust you will agree with us that these are entirely inappropriate behaviors from an 11-year-old boy and, taken as a whole, warrant our decision to expel your son from the school. Like any other community, we believe that our school has to be a safe space for its students, and we no longer have confidence in our ability to provide that safe space if your son continues to attend this institution.

We urge you both to seek whatever services you can to help your son. Our concern is that unless his behavior—which our school psychologist has warned verges on the sociopathic—is checked now he will, as he reaches maturity, almost certainly run afoul of the law.

There is no doubt in my mind that Trump’s behavior would, indeed, get him expelled from an elementary school. And, I suspect, if my readers—of all political persuasions—were honest with themselves, they would come to the same conclusions. Yet, today, armed with his vicious tongue and his online troll’s persona, he is the most powerful man on earth, his finger on the nuclear trigger, his cabinet meetings obscene, sycophantic displays. Will any of Trump’s cabinet resign in disgust at his vicious remarks about Rob Reiner? Don’t hold your breath. Will any of them seek to invoke the 25th Amendment? Not in a million years.

And so, America’s Caligula will continue his mad reign. And all of us will continue to be debased by his grotesqueries.