Ben Wiseman The president’s depravity is deathless
By Frank Bruni
There are many signs of President Trump’s deterioration, but on one front he has indisputably grown sharper and faster.
He’s at his peak when it comes to maligning the dead.
He used to be more shambolic about it. After John McCain’s death in August 2018, the aspersions that Trump cast on the Arizona senator were feeble and fitful, with Trump’s summary judgment — “I never was a fan” — coming more than six months later. That statement was as needless as it was tactless. Trump had made his disdain for McCain clear all the way back in 2015, when he mocked McCain’s five and a half years as a prisoner of war, suggesting that winners don’t get captured and tortured.
Trump was quicker to kick Colin Powell’s corpse. The highly decorated general and former secretary of state died in October 2021; Trump’s public condemnation of him came within about 24 hours. He memorialized Powell’s “big mistakes on Iraq,” and he accused Powell of disloyalty to fellow Republicans, which really meant a refusal to genuflect before Trump. Trump measures people not by what they’ve done for others but by what they’ve denied him. He uses the narcissist’s yardstick.
And he whacked Robert Mueller with it, rejoicing over the former F.B.I. director’s death almost simultaneously with the news of it a week ago Saturday. “Good,” Trump exulted in a social media post. “I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
On McCain’s and Powell’s graves, Trump did a lazy waltz. On Mueller’s, a jitterbug.
And we’ve already moved on. We always do. That’s the thing about Trump’s moral grotesqueness — there’s so much of it that no one instance, no single episode, can hold our attention for long. He maxes out our memories, the new depravity quickly overwriting the old depravity on our hard drives.
But let’s not let purge his denigration of Mueller just yet. For several reasons, it warrants more than a fleeting wince.
A common thread runs through the lives of McCain, Powell and Mueller. All three were military veterans. All three saw combat. And all three received Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts for their service and injuries in Vietnam — the place that Trump avoided with a physician’s note attesting to his ostensibly debilitating bone spurs.
Is Trump shamed by their examples? He’s surely baffled by their choices. Trump wouldn’t risk a paper cut unless there was multi-million-dollar payoff on the far side of the nick. And he has privately referred to Americans killed in wars as “suckers” for having put their lives on the line, according to reports — which he has called “fake news” — by several news organizations.
It’s as if he needs desperately to feel superior to those soldiers, to cast their strength as weakness, their courage as folly, lest his own cowardice be exposed. And so he disparaged McCain, Powell and Mueller, talking smack about them even (especially?) when they could no longer talk back.
His pronounced venom for Mueller no doubt reflects his particular interest in discrediting his work as a special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller’s inquiry bedeviled Trump for much of his first term in the White House, and when, in 2019, Mueller released a report saying that he could not determine definitively that the Trump campaign had — or had not — conspired with Russia, Trump falsely claimed complete exoneration, putting the phrases “witch hunt” and “Russia hoax” in heavy rotation.
Trump’s spinning of Mueller’s report was his dress rehearsal for his rewriting of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. It required the transformation of Mueller from earnest public servant to vengeful monster, and Trump was hardly going to abandon or halt that project upon Mueller’s death.
It’s always about Trump, it’s all about Trump and his rants about the recently departed are hardly confined to those in government. In December, after the beloved movie director Rob Reiner and his wife were fatally stabbed in their Los Angeles home, Trump attributed their deaths to their political opposition to him. He wrote in a social media post that Reiner perished “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” It was appalling. And it was quickly forgotten.
That’s why I’m revisiting it. That’s why I’m mentioning Mueller. Trump wants us to become inured to his offenses because inoculates him from any consequences. He wants to degrade us — he wants to degrade everything — because he’s a more fitting ruler with freer rein if his kingdom has been leeched of all decency.
He’s a hypocrite, of course, as are the lickspittles around him. After Charlie Kirk’s death, they freaked out about any stray whisper of the uglier parts of Kirk’s legacy — it was untimely, unseemly, cruel — but they shrug at Trump’s sadism. They ignore his souring of Kirk’s memorial itself, where Trump said flippantly that he hates his enemies. All of that they recast as boldness. Or they claim that it’s harmless: It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s a presidential perk, like winged swag from Qatar, a tacky ballroom and incompetent underlings.
No. It’s more than that, and it’s worse than that. It’s a retreat from empathy, generosity, kindness. And it’s telling. The way we respond to death says everything about who we are. If we can’t extend the dead a bit of grace, it’s because we’re graceless.
