On Saturday, when Trump feted the death of Robert Mueller with sociopathic glee (“Good, I’m glad he’s dead”), I asked myself the same question that I’ve pondered for years: Didn’t his mother ever wash his mouth out with soap?
The mere act of reading his “Truth” Social post left me feeling dirty. Was there not even a millimeter of decency in the man, just enough to grudgingly acknowledge in a word or phrase that Mueller had devoted his life to making this country great? Was that too much to ask?
Why bother.
The ostensible reason for Trump’s delight was the demise of a guy who had dared to challenge him. What few people in the United States of Amnesia seem to remember is that Mueller, as special counsel, uncovered multiple damaging truths about Trump’s ascent: A hostile foreign power had invaded the U.S. electoral process in a systematic bid to elect him; the Trump campaign willingly accepted that help with the expectation of benefiting from it; when federal investigators tried to find out what happened, the Trump White House repeatedly and systematically lied about it; and Trump himself personally engaged in multiple acts of obstruction. So said Mueller’s final report in 2019. Few took the time to read it.
But I suspect that, deep down in Trump’s damaged depraved psyche, where perhaps Dr. Melfi in The Sopranos could effectively probe, perhaps with the help of sodium pentathol, there is a wee spark of realization that he couldn’t hold Mueller’s pen if it were duct-taped to his fingers.
Mueller was everything that Trump is not. Mueller’s exemplary personal code — honor, duty, public service, selfless sacrifice, the stuff of American heroism — is unfathomable to a global pariah, someone who ran a third time for president in a bid to feather his own nest and evade federal prosecution.
Vietnam is where their characters sharply diverge. Trump took four education deferments plus an I-Y medical deferment for fake bone spurs in order to dodge the draft; Mueller volunteered for the Marines, and underwent knee surgery in order to ensure that he could go. Trump joked on Howard Stern’s show that staying home and “screwing a lot of women” was his “personal Vietnam.” Mueller led a rifle platoon in combat, in a province with some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, and was rescuing wounded Marines when an AK-47 bullet hit his thigh.
He made it home and embarked on a life of public service; in his words, “Perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.” A lifelong Republican, he oversaw federal criminal prosecutions as an assistant U.S. attorney general for the first George Bush, and later served as a homicide prosecutor in Washington during D.C.’s early ‘90s crime wave (the kind of work Trump would presumably applaud). He was tapped by the second George Bush to run the FBI, taking the helm one week before 9/11. He was confirmed 98-0 by the Senate, and when Barack Obama extended his tenure he was confirmed 100-0. He overhauled the FBI, prioritizing the fight against terrorism (the kind of work Trump would presumably applaud), and we’ll never know many domestic plots Mueller and his team may have foiled.
But I’m fixated on that confirmation math: Two Senate approvals by a combined score of 198-0. Robert Mueller may be the last of a vanishing species: The nonpartisan career public servant who was beyond reproach, someone who puts country over party, reticence over recklessness, selflessness over self-interest, with abiding respect for the rule of law and its institutional guardrails. Given the toxic polarization that afflicts us today, it’s almost impossible to conjure anyone with Mueller’s gravitas.
Sadly, Americans who are nominally familiar with Mueller know only about his final actions - charting Russian interference and the ‘16 Trump campaign’s complicity, while refusing to recommend that Trump be criminally indicted. As a institutionalist, he honored a Justice Department memo that warned against charging a sitting president. He testified oh so carefully - too carefully for the Trump era’s smashmouth politics - that “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” But Trump spun that as “TOTAL EXONERATION.”
Mueller — hewing to proper channel, exuding faith in the system — said it was Congress’ duty to decide whether Trump’s “wrongdoing” warranted impeachment and removal; he teed it up by saying, “When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to the investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.” But Trump’s congressional lickspittles slammed the brakes on that.
So today, we’re left with the amoral sinkhole’s celebration of Mueller’s passing. But it would be a mistake to heap our animus on him alone. The very fact that 77 million voters decided to rehire him — despite the endless evidence of his abysmally low behavior — speaks to the degradation of our national character, to the death of consensus civility, to a broad rebuke of all that the deceased stood for.
We can safely assume that Mueller wouldn’t want us to accelerate the decline by responding in kind, and we can best honor him best by not doing so. But if marchers at the next No Kings rally show up with the same placards as last time — most notably, “Cholesterol, Do Your Job” — many people will cheer the prospect. Robert Mueller’s values are in eclipse and the thirst for payback can’t be quenched. This is Trump’s America and we are diminished by it.
