When Empathy Is Called Weakness

I had planned to turn my attention to a post closer to home, and I still will. But some things cut through everything else, and this was one of them.

Robert Mueller has died. For many people, his name will always be tied to the Russia investigation, the endless headlines, the partisan warfare, and the years Donald Trump turned him into a target for grievance and rage. But Robert Mueller was never just that chapter in American political history. He was a serious man long before he became a political lightning rod.

Mueller graduated from Princeton, served as a United States Marine in Vietnam, was wounded in combat, and received the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. After law school, he became a litigator and then a federal prosecutor, working his way steadily through the ranks of public service. In 2001, President George W. Bush tapped him to become the sixth director of the FBI. He was confirmed unanimously by the Senate and sworn in on September 4, 2001, just seven days before the attacks of September 11 changed the country and much of his tenure. Whatever one thought of specific decisions over the years, this was a man whose life was shaped by duty, discipline, service, and seriousness.

And today, after his death, Donald Trump posted this on Truth Social: “Robert Mueller just died. Good. I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”

I still almost cannot believe that a president of the United States would respond to the death of a decorated veteran and lifelong public servant with that kind of ugliness, but here we are. There is no clever analysis that improves it. There is no both-sides language that softens it. It is vile, indecent and morally bankrupt.

As I was trying to process my own anger, my son walked in the door. I said, Trump’s a monster. Then I went further. I said, he’s not human.

My son stopped me. He said that when I say someone is not human, I am letting humanity off the hook. I am pretending that evil sits somewhere outside the human condition, when the harder and more uncomfortable truth is that some human beings are fully capable of cruelty, malice, and degradation beyond what we want to admit. They are still human. That is precisely the problem. And he is right.

That part hit me, because there are so many people like that in the world right now. So much of what we are living through is a confrontation with the fact that not everyone is decent, not everyone is guided by conscience, and not everyone is restrained by even the most basic sense of kindness toward others. We still want to believe people are innately good. We want to believe there is some line most people will not cross. But over and over again, life reminds us that some do cross it, and some do so publicly, proudly, and without shame.

That is why another quote has been rattling around in my head. Elon Musk recently said that empathy is a fundamental weakness of Western civilization. I think that poison is part of the same sickness. Because what kind of civilization survives by treating empathy as weakness? What kind of moral framework calls kindness a flaw?

And what I cannot stop wrestling with is how so many people who speak endlessly about Christianity, and about saving Western civilization, line themselves up behind that kind of thinking. Empathy and kindness are not weaknesses. They are at the core of most faith traditions. They are at the core of any society worth saving. If your version of strength requires mocking the dead, celebrating cruelty, and scorning compassion, then what exactly are you trying to preserve?

As much as I recoil from Trump’s behaviour, the truth is not that he is somehow outside humanity. The truth is that he is a brutal example of one part of it. Humanity contains courage and cowardice. It contains honour and corruption. It contains restraint, discipline, and sacrifice, and it also contains pettiness, cruelty, and public sadism.

A man has died. For his family, this is not politics. It is the loss of a husband, father, grandfather, sibling, friend, and colleague. For those who served with him, worked with him, or respected him, it is the loss of someone whose life stood for something larger than himself. And in that moment, the president of the United States chose not silence, not basic courtesy, not even the stale diplomatic platitude most politicians can manage when someone they dislike dies. He chose spite and mockery.

That is not strength. It is rot.

Robert Mueller represented something that now seems almost antique in public life. Seriousness, duty, integrity and reserve. The belief that institutions matter, that the law matters, that public office is not a personal brand exercise and not a revenge machine. He was not flashy. He was not theatrical. He was not interested in being adored. He was a serious man doing serious work in serious times.

So yes, note to my son, I will concede the point. Donald Trump is human. And perhaps that is the darkest lesson of all. Because if we keep pretending that people like him are somehow beyond humanity, we avoid the far more frightening truth that they are not. They are entirely human, and so are the systems that elevate them, the followers who excuse them, and the culture that begins to treat cruelty as candour and indecency as strength.

One man leaves behind a life of service, sacrifice, discipline, and duty. The other leaves behind a daily wreckage of contempt. And yes, both are human.

But they do not leave the same mark on the world.