Chief Grave Dancer

Donald Trump finds a new presidential role

“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Robert Mueller died Friday night at 81 after years with Parkinson’s disease. He’s survived by his wife of nearly 60 years, two daughters, and three grandchildren.

In times of death, presidents have played a pastoral role. Donald Trump has perfected the opposite. He is a presidential grave dancer.

Mueller graduated from Princeton and volunteered for service. He was a Marine officer in Vietnam, Bronze Star for heroism, Purple Heart. A registered Republican appointed and reappointed to Senate-confirmed positions by presidents of both parties — Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama. He took over the FBI a week before September 11 and served for twelve years — the second-longest tenure after Hoover.

The man Trump is glad is dead devoted his career to the institutions Trump claims to lead.

Mueller’s investigation produced 37 indictments and seven guilty pleas. His 448-page report identified substantial contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia but did not allege a criminal conspiracy. President Trump said the report exonerated him, but Mueller wrote that if his investigation had established the president did not obstruct justice, he would have said so — and he couldn’t say so.

What’s new here isn’t the sentiment — Trump called the investigation a witch hunt hundreds of times. It’s the venue. This is a sitting president publicly celebrating the death of a public servant on the day his family announced it, while that family asked for privacy. The personal grudge and the presidential voice inhabit the sacrosanct. There’s no institutional filter, no staff intervention, no even minimal gesture toward the norms that once governed how presidents acknowledged the dead — even adversaries.

This is the difference between a president who holds office and a president who holds grudges. Mueller never held a press conference during the investigation, never responded to the attacks, and maintained institutional silence to the end. One mode of public conduct was designed to preserve institutional legitimacy. The other is designed to destroy a perceived enemy’s reputation even posthumously.

The message sent by this post isn’t just for the grieving Mueller family. It’s for every career civil servant, every investigator, and every intelligence officer currently in the ranks. Serve the state, and you become a permanent target for the person who happens to head it.

Over the past year, Trump has returned several times to the question of his own salvation. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he told Fox News last summer. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.” In October, aboard Air Force One: “I don’t think there’s anything going to get me in heaven. I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound.” At the National Prayer Breakfast in February: “I really think I probably should make it.”

Proverbs 24:17: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles, lest the Lord see it and be displeased.”