For years, President Donald Trump has offered crass and insensitive comments about people who died — especially his foes.
But on Saturday, he explicitly celebrated the death of former FBI Director Robert Mueller, writing, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”
As a special counsel, Mueller probed Trump and his 2016 campaign as the leader of the Russia investigation during the president’s first term.
“Robert Mueller just died,” Trump posted on social media shortly after the death was first reported. “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
While it was the culmination of a yearslong series of such comments by Trump, it was hardly an isolated incident.
In 2017, one of the first big controversies of Trump’s first term was his insensitive alleged comments to the widow of a soldier who had just died. Trump was accused of telling the widow that her husband “knew what he signed up for.” And while Trump claimed it had been a “very respectful conversation,” the White House eventually seemed to tacitly confirm the comments.
After John McCain died in August 2018, Trump in early 2019 resumed his yearslong attacks on the former Arizona senator. He criticized the Republican for killing Trump’s health care law, saying, “I never was a fan of John McCain, and I never will be.” Trump also falsely claimed the recently deceased had graduated “last in his class” and falsely accused him of sharing the “Steele dossier” with the FBI before the 2016 election.
In late 2019, Trump attacked another legislative foe who died that year — longtime Rep. John Dingell — by suggesting the Michigan Democrat was “looking up” from hell.
Dingell’s widow, Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan, responded: “I’m preparing for the first holiday season without the man I love. You brought me down in a way you can never imagine and your hurtful words just made my healing much harder.”
By 2021, Trump’s jabs at the deceased became more instantaneous. About 24 hours after former Secretary of State Colin Powell died, Trump released a statement criticizing his “big mistakes on Iraq” and calling him a “classic RINO” who was always “the first to attack other Republicans.”
(Powell had openly criticized Trump and crossed party lines to vote against him in 2016 and 2020.)
And Trump’s tendency has really ramped up in recent months.
In December, he reposted a series of attacks on the Kennedy family just hours after John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, died following a terminal brain cancer diagnosis.
That came just a couple of weeks after arguably Trump’s most insensitive comments about a deceased critic. And this wasn’t just someone who had recently died, mind you, but someone who had been brutally murdered.
Shortly after the killing of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Trump suggested Reiner had died from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights” recently, Trump added.
A number of Republicans criticized Trump’s post.
But just three months later, here is Trump again.
Except this time, he’s not just saying crass things about someone who died, but rather explicitly celebrating their demise.