Can A Hollywood Celebrity Find The Truth About Trump and Russia?
Meathead’s pretty sure Archie Bunker’s still with Donald Trump—but the man who played the son-in-law of the irascible “All in the Family” patron isn’t ready to give up on the real-world Archie Bunkers just yet.
Rob Reiner wasn’t the only one who made the connection between Trump and the 1970s TV sitcom last year. But so far, he hasn’t seen anything that would shake the kind of armchair white backlash voter that Bunker was supposed to represent.
“When they discover that he’s using their campaign funds for legal fees, that might make a little dent, but we don’t see a lot of it,” Reiner told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast recorded at his dining room table at his apartment in Manhattan. “I don’t know if Archie would abandon Trump at this point.”
Reiner’s character on “All in the Family,” Michael Stivic, was a liberal true believer who often clashed with his conservative father-in-law over his rants about blacks, “commies” and hippies. In the four decades since the show went off the air, Reiner has taken up cause after liberal cause himself as a director and political activist.
His latest cause: Trump, joining a Hollywood cast of thousands who are taking on the president. But with a cultural divide that in just the past week has seen Jimmy Kimmel, Steph Curry, LeBron James, the NFL and just about every speaker at the Emmys throw themselves into the political arena, Reiner says it’s not the entertainers at fault.
“Trump is a gold mine, because he’s easy to make fun of and all that,” he acknowledges. But, he says, “I would suggest that that doesn’t divide us. What divides us is the people who are running the show. They’ll divide us more than the comedians.”
Trump reliably returns to whipping up culture fights, spending all weekend tweeting rage and threats about football players kneeling for the national anthem to protest racism. (As of Monday, he had tweeted about the issue at least 18 times.) So there’s probably nothing he’d like more than a rumble with a bunch of Hollywood liberals, too.
Reiner gets it. “I get attacked all the time for being a celebrity, how ‘God gives you a right to speak out, and you’re just a celebrity, and why should we bother listening to you,’ and all that,” he says. “And the fact is, if I didn’t steep myself in the things that I was talking about, then you shouldn’t listen to me anymore than anybody else.”
“Unfortunately, we do listen to celebrities more than we should. I would point to the president of the United States right now,” Reiner adds. “This is a person who is not steeped in policy, is not steeped in government, but is a celebrity, and to use that cliché, it trumps everything.”
Reiner is trying to break through to Trump voters over Russia’s unprecedented meddling in the 2016 election. His new project is The Committee to Investigate Russia, a website gathering news and information on the various Russia inquiries that he hopes will help spur a 9/11-type, bipartisan commission that will bring everything together in a definitive report and make concrete recommendations. On its board are former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, prominent Never Trumpers David Frum, the Atlantic senior editor, and former conservative radio host Charlie Sykes. A web ad featuring Morgan Freeman leads the site.
So far, Reiner says, he has donated about $100,000 of his own money, and sits on its board of advisers. He says he and his wife will “probably put more in as is needed.”
The project was born of Reiner’s mounting frustration that the Russia story isn’t resonating with Trump voters, who tend to be skeptical that there was any Russian hacking at all. “In the past we’ve always come together as a country when we’ve been attacked by a foreign enemy; whether it was Pearl Harbor or 911,” he says. “And for this, for the first time, [it] is not so.”
For that, Reiner blames the president himself, who only last week was calling the Russia story a “hoax” even as his Department of Homeland Security was notifying 21 states that Russian hackers had poked around in their election systems. “When their standard-bearer is refuting the fact that the Russians did, in fact, invade us during the 2016 election, it makes it a much more difficult argument to make,” Reiner acknowledges.