Donald Trump, this is not about you

Donald Trump just 'marked himself safe' at someone else’s death

Donald Trump’s ability to worm his way into everything is impressive, honestly - but this recent event truly must be one of the most fucked up things he’s ever done.

We don’t need to go into what he said, but these comments on the tragic death of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, earlier this week are nothing short of just gross. At the time of writing, their son Nick has been arrested and charged with their double murder. His battles with addiction have been well publicised, even creating the film “Being Charlie” with his dad, based on this journey.

From now on, a lot will be said about Nick; his addiction, his life, and mostly his relationship with his parents, and their tragic deaths that shouldn’t have happened.

But do you know who has nothing to do with literally any of that? Donald Trump.

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In his latest post on Truth Social, Donald Trump just did the equivalent of marking himself safe from a natural disaster in a country he’s never even been to, or posting a status to say “omg, that could have been me” during a crisis in a place he had been to years earlier.

Something that we all universally agreed we probably shouldn’t do anymore, because we all know better, and it honestly just reeks of something a bit pathetic.

In 2011, in the wake of the truly devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Facebook started developing the concept of the “safety check”. As people scrambled to find out if their missing relatives had made it to safety, miscommunications and comms outages created distress and confusion - of course it did, when you have a large population dealing with a life-changing event, it’s really bloody hard to connect.

And, when you’re dealing with the aftermath of something like that, you actually may not have the capacity to check back in with every person you know to let them know that you’re ok.

Which got the engineers at Facebook thinking about a way people could let their connections know on masse that they were safe in the event of a catastrophe (and quite likely also as a way of retaining users, so they could keep using data and making money - we all feed the beast).

In late 2014, the safety check was officially released.

But, in these early days, it wasn’t wildly sophisticated. So, during a natural disaster like the Nepal earthquake in 2015, everyone I knew in the UK got a notification to say if they needed to be marked safe from the Nepal Earthquake.

As the impact and aftershocks continued to ripple through the region, 9,000 people lost their lives, and communities literally had no idea where to even begin rebuilding; friends of mine were publicly marking themselves safe from an earthquake that happened in a country they’d never step foot in.

For the most part, this was likely just the testing of a new feature. It’s interesting, it’s Facebook! Does it matter that we’ve never been to Nepal? Oh, right.

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The memes and commentary around this erupted, with people being called out for the behaviour as silly at best, and attention seeking during a time of genuine crisis at worst.

This kept happening, people who were not in a country, a state, or not attending an event marking themselves safe when the notification popped up. A bandwagon jumped on because Facebook asked if you wanted to get on.

But this backlash showed that it’s pretty clear it’s kind of quite gross to insert yourself into something disastrous when it has literally nothing to do with you. It may be small-scale, but it’s a distraction in airtime that’s needed for people to get updates about the actual situation.

People have of course, been jumping on the back of tragedies for way longer than the safety check was around - typically to make some cash or get the attention they feel they were lacking, like fake 9/11 survivor Tania Head. But this brought it so easily into the social media sphere, where many of us now live our lives, with more information than we know what to do with and instant access to everything, all the time.

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There are times when the news cycle - or to bring it back to this piece, a Facebook feed - just doesn’t need to about you. It needed to be about Rob and Michele, and their family, who now have to try to grapple with what’s undoubtedly going to be the hardest time of all their lives.

All without the equivalent of the world’s most annoying Facebook friend wading in to say “But, what about me?” - because if you genuinely must ask that, then you should just get on the phone to a therapist within the hour. Especially when you’ve got Marjorie Taylor-Greene telling you to wind your neck in on this topic.

A final note to end this on, that the loss of Rob and Michele is a deep loss for everyone who knew them, and to those who loved his work - and that everyone involved can someday find peace.

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Who wrote this?
Hannah Palframan – usually found writing from the giant pile of clothes she’s just tried on, originally from the UK but now at home in Aotearoa.