I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad and Robert Mueller.
Both were attorneys. Both had seen heavy combat in the military. Both were FBI agents. Both led lives that embodied the values that were once assumed to be exemplary.
James Fallows wrote that Trump’s remark, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” was “the most despicable public statement by an American public official in my lifetime.”
There’s a scene early in the great Coen Brothers film, No Country For Old Men in which the sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, comes across a murder scene in the desert. His deputy says, “”This is turnin’ into a hell of a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff?” Jones responds, “If it isn’t, it’ll do until the mess gets here.”
So it is with Trump’s vomit-inducing celebration of the death of an American hero. Trump is likely to come out with something even more despicable at any minute, but the sad spectacle of an American president dancing on the grave of a man who lived a patriotic life of virtue will long be remembered as another death in the mass suicide of decency in the Republican party.
This is not about Trump. He’s a deeply disturbed sociopath slipping into the darkness of dementia and failing health. It is about the collective failure of the Republican party to exhibit even a base level of admirable human qualities. If a woman is raped in a busy airport and the passengers ignore it and walk by, the shame and guilt is shared by every person who looks the other way. When they stop to cheer the rapist, they are active participants in the horrific crime.
When Trump announced for president in 2015, the Republican Party mostly ignored him and kept walking. In the first poll after his announcement, Trump received 5% of the vote among Republican primary voters. Every Republican presidential candidate, all 15 of them, believed that the goal was to end up one-on-one with Trump, with all others eliminated.