OPINION:
President Trump’s taking ghoulish glee Saturday in the death of former FBI Director Robert Mueller III was undignified, in exceedingly poor taste and, to say the least, unpresidential.
“Robert S. Mueller is dead. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social online platform, which was subsequently amplified on the White House’s X account.
Mr. Mueller, who served as FBI director from 2001 to 2013, died Friday at age 81. Parkinson’s disease was diagnosed in 2021, but family members did not disclose the cause of his death in the statement they issued Saturday announcing his passing.
Even for many Republicans who voted for Mr. Trump three times, the president’s reaction was disturbing. They said he should have taken the high road and said nothing. Other Trump supporters, less charitable, said what amounted to “Payback is a b——” and “Good riddance.”
It’s understandable why Mr. Trump would have so viscerally despised Mr. Mueller, given that the former FBI director’s service as the Justice Department’s special counsel investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s contemptible — dare we say, “trumped-up” — Trump-Russia collusion hoax surrounding the 2016 election lent it credibility it didn’t deserve.
Still, the president should have kept his schadenfreude to himself or, at worst, shared it only with his inner circle.
What Mr. Trump regularly and vehemently decried as “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” concocted by Democrats with the assistance of onetime British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, cast a long-running cloud over the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s November 2016 presidential election victory over Mrs. Clinton.
The investigation also dogged Mr. Trump’s presidency well into his first term before Mr. Mueller’s probe finally wrapped up in the spring of 2019. In his “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” issued on April 18, 2019, Mr. Mueller said Moscow did seek to influence American public opinion via social media but that his report neither accused nor exonerated the president.
Throughout the investigation, Mr. Trump and his allies rightly dubbed it a “witch hunt” by Democrats and the deep state, which intended to cripple, if not end, his presidency.
Still, Mr. Trump’s undignified and unseemly attack on Mr. Mueller appears to be part of a pattern, eerily echoing the venom with which the president reacted to the December slaying of another archnemesis, longtime Hollywood actor-director Rob Reiner.
In a Dec. 15 Truth Social post, Mr. Trump wrote: “A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented, movie director and comedy star, has passed away … reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.
“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights.”
Neither Reiner’s “passing away,” nor that of his wife, Michele Singer Reiner (both of whom were fatally stabbed in their home), had anything to do with Trump derangement syndrome, even though the Hollywood mogul was such a ferocious critic of the president that he could have been considered a major vector in the spread of TDS.
For Mr. Trump three months ago to assert that Reiner was felled by a lethal strain of TDS, and now to take unseemly delight in Mr. Mueller’s death, was stooping to the gutter level of the left-wing extremists who regretted that the would-be assassin that came within a centimeter or two of killing the once and future president in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, had not been a better shot.
The bottom line is that Mr. Trump has serious impulse control issues and desperately needs a filter on his social media posts. He should have his White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, or another close adviser vet his “Truths” and X posts and urge him to dial them back when necessary before he hits “send.”
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