Trump Will Gladly Do the Jitterbug on Your Grave

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

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 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 purge his denigration of Mueller just yet. For several reasons, it warrants more than a fleeting wince.

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Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter.  Instagram  Threads  @FrankBruni • Facebook

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