The high cost of ‘I’m glad he’s dead’
Trump celebrates Mueller’s death, and nobody is surprised.
When former FBI director Robert Mueller died last week at 81, President Trump marked the occasion with his customary grace. “Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” he posted on Truth Social. “He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
You may have registered this as Example No. 79,412 in a long-running series — “Things Trump Says That Would Have Ended Any Previous Political Career” — and moved on. After all, it is not the first time Trump has treated a critic’s death as an occasion for contempt. The post generated its predictable storm of condemnation and counter-spin. Within a couple of news cycles, the whole thing was already dissipating.
Mueller was a decorated Marine, a Bronze Star recipient, a man who served his country in Vietnam and then spent decades more in public service. Whatever one thinks of his investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election, he conducted it in conspicuous silence, without leaks or grandstanding, and stepped away when it was done. He was, by any reasonable measure, a public servant of the old school. He died, as we all will, unable to answer back. And the president of the United States celebrated.
This isn’t just boorishness. It’s a specific kind of moral failure, and it has a name: incivility. People sometimes dismiss incivility as a trivial shortcoming, like using the wrong fork for the salad. But civility is much more important than superficial politeness. It is a democratic virtue grounded in sacrifice, courtesy, and restraint. Self-government cannot endure without it.
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Yale law professor Stephen Carter made that case with uncommon force in his 1998 book, “Civility,” a searching examination of why the virtue matters and what is lost without it.
Carter’s book opens with a vivid image of America in the 19th century, when trains supplanted horses as the fastest way to travel. Because only the wealthy could travel in privacy, most travel was in groups. “One bought a ticket and sat down in a train car full of strangers,” Carter writes. The technology required people to travel together in large numbers, often packed shoulder to shoulder for hours on end. For the journey to be bearable, everyone had to act with courtesy and consideration.
Passengers actually bought guides to proper behavior, such as Isaac Peebles’s “Politeness on Railroads.” Conductors enforced the rules. And travelers understood, in Carter’s words, that they followed those rules “out of a spirit of self-denial and the self-sacrifice of one’s own comfort for another’s.” Civility, in other words, was not weakness or performance. It was the only way to ensure that a journey shared with many others would be tolerable.
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But then came the automobile — and with it, Carter argues, something corrosive. We now travel “surrounded by metal and glass and the illusion that we are traveling alone,” he wrote. That illusion has seeped into public life, persuading us that sacrifice for others is no longer necessary. “We care less and less about our fellow citizens,” Carter writes, “because we no longer see them as our fellow passengers.”
It is such a striking image because it captures an essential fact of pluralistic life: We are all passengers together in a confined space, bound to one another whether we choose it or not.
That is why civility is not, as its critics sometimes claim, a mark of weakness or timidity — a nicety for people too polite to say what they really think. The opposite is true. Impulse is easy; restraint is hard. Anyone can lash out. It takes genuine strength to govern one’s tongue, to treat with dignity someone you despise, to remember that even your adversary is a fellow passenger who shares your carriage and your country. Civility isn’t a privilege we reserve for our friends and supporters.
Trump’s “I’m glad he’s dead” was not bold truth-telling. It was the snarl of a man so intoxicated with his own resentments that even a critic’s death cannot pass without being turned into a performance of contempt. But the deeper alarm isn’t any single outburst — it’s the normalization. What once shocked now barely registers; what once disqualified now entertains. Across the political spectrum, savage contempt for opponents has become a standard mode of public expression, modeled by leaders, amplified by social media, and rewarded with attention and applause.
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In a mobile, diverse democracy full of strangers, historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. observed in a 1946 study, citizens carry “no better letter of introduction than their adherence to common precepts of courtesy.” That letter of introduction is how free people signal, to one another and to the world, that self-government is still possible. Societies that lose the habit of civility don’t recover it easily. Passengers who forget they share a carriage eventually stop caring whether the train arrives at all.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby.
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