I don’t know how much time you have spent with families deep in grief, but I have spent an inordinate amount of time with such people. As a reporter, I interviewed grieving parents after they lost a daughter in a car wreck, a mother who delivered a dead baby, a solider nurse who was forced to let a premature baby die, a grown woman who as a teenager watched her cousin get bombed, parents whose 15-year old son died of alcohol poisoning, a Texas Ranger whose son died in a fiery car crash days after he arrived home from duty in a war zone, parents whose son was killed in a shoot out with local police, grandparents whose youngest grand died by suicide at age 14, women who’ve died from breast cancer, the sister of two Hispanic boys, ages 10 and 12, struck by a van as they crossed a busy road, and so many survivors of people murdered or those killed in action in war zones that I have lost count.

Not to mention writing about the deaths of my own parents, one to cancer, one to war.

Never once did it occur to me to denigrate, demean, or defile people in such moments. In every instance I tried to offer the one thing I always longed for myself – a heart that listens. I’ve written before about the silence that surrounded my father’s death and how lonely it was to sit in such silence. My friend Hugh Hollowell says the thing that someone hurting really needs is for a soul willing to sit in the dark alongside them. I have tried to be that person. I try still to be that person.

I have zero tolerance for people who condemn the grieving by saying they just need to get over it. Some years ago, I overheard two women yapping about the recent death of a beloved spouse of a third woman. These two women felt that the widow went on too much about her husband’s passing. They gossiped back and forth about how they felt that her grief should be more private, keep it to herself, nobody wants to be bothered by another person’s grief. Too attention seeking, they concluded.

The whole conversation got on my last nerve. While I didn’t know these people, didn’t interrupt their conversation, I was struck by how comfortable they felt making judgements about the grief others. If you are my friend and you lose a loved one, through death or divorce or just divergent paths, I’m going to do my best to sit in that dark space with you. I don’t have any pithy advice to offer, no quick fixes to staunch the flow of tears that come in the heat of longing or the sacred silence of mourning. I got nothing to offer really, other than I’m here, willing to listen.

It’s because of all those hours I’ve spent in that space with the grieving that I, like you, was mortified by the cruelty of Trump’s remarks about the murders of Rob and Michelle Reiner. I’m not going to repost Trump’s hateful message here. A simple search will bring it up.

Without question his remarks were some of the most vile remarks ever sputtered by a sitting US president. And if you are sitting silent or pretending like it was all no big deal, the way Susie Wiles does every single day that she serves as his Chief of Staff, or drumming up some shameful defense of Trump, you might as well spew that hateful rhetoric out of your own pie hole.

I will not tolerate hearing one more person pretending that they aren’t as cruel as the man they elected. They take cover behind their own self-righteousness, claiming they like his policies but wish he’d shut his mouth. The bible is clear on this one issue: Evil company corrupts good habits. (I Corinthians 15:33 NJV). And just in case you haven’t been paying attention, Trump is evil company and he surrounds himself with equally as evil people promoting evil policies.

They are murdering boat people.

They are disappearing US citizens.

They are terrorizing the poor.

They are letting murderers and sex abusers and violent men and women out of prison.

They are flooding the country with thugs and criminals.

They are hosting leaders of genocides in the Oval Office.

They are denying human rights to the masses and the marginalized.

They have caged people. Literally put them in cages.

They have separated children from parents.

They’ve denied food from the starving.

They’ve cut medical care for the sick & denied vaccines that protect babies.

They demonize those working hard to make a living.

They’ve unemployed millions and then denied benefits to sustain them.

All while diverting billions to their already wealthy friends and themselves.

On and on and on it goes. All aided and abetted by Republicans in Congress and your neighbors and mine, who continue to pretend none of this is happening, and even if it is, it’s not so bad.

Or like Susie Wiles, who helps masterminds it all and then denies any responsibility for the cruelty or deaths that result because of her actions.

Women like Susie Wiles have always betrayed the American people in order to win the approval of men who mockingly demean them.

Wiles may think of herself as a powerful woman but the reality is what sort of power is it when you have to defile yourself before a psychopath like Trump? Or Vance? Or Hegseth? Or any number of Republican men who get their jollies out of debasing others? The way Trump did when he wrote that post following the tragic murders of the Reiners.

Trump’s hunger to be praised is rooted in his overwhelming fear, and denial of the knowledge that he will never elicit the kind of admiration, devotion and sheer love that Rob and Michelle Reiner did from people the world over.

And neither will Susie Wiles.