Robert Mueller has died.

He was an American, a man who lived out in his deeds and his words his love for our country, who answered the call every time it came, who never boasted about or cashed in on his remarkable career of public service in war and peace. A real patriot.

“Good. I’m glad he’s dead.”

That was President Donald Trump’s reaction to the death of Robert Mueller. And the thing about it is that even after so many years of parading before the world a character so debased and degraded, so cruel and stupid and small, so awful that if a novelist or screenwriter had come up with such a fictional figure no one would have thought it believable except as gross satire or perhaps a certain kind of horror—even after all these years of Trump, it turns out he can still go lower. There is no bottom.

A man like Trump simply cannot understand a man like Robert Mueller. He cannot perceive any value in virtue. Mueller lived a duty-driven life; Trump cannot conceive of a duty-driven minute. He hated Mueller for that distinction, for the unbridgeable gulf between the kind of man Bob Mueller was and the kind of man Donald Trump knows himself to be. That’s why he committed this obscenity, this violation of a norm so fundamental it exists in every human culture, and it is the same reason Trump must endlessly praise himself—because deep down, he knows what we all know: Robert Mueller was the better man.

“I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam,” Mueller said in 2011. “There were many who did not. And perhaps because I did survive, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”

Trump avoided that war. He’s started a new one now, a big one, and it’s going pretty much as you’d expect from a man of Trump’s character.

Robert Swan Mueller III was born into privilege. His father was an executive at DuPont; his grandfather was a railroad president. Educated at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire (John Kerry was a classmate) and at Princeton, he joined the Marine Corps after graduating from college and getting a graduate degree from New York University.

It was, and remains, an unusual choice for an Ivy Leaguer. Mueller was inspired by the example of David Hackett, a close friend from Princeton who had joined the Marines in 1966 and who was killed in battle in Vietnam, April 30, 1967. Robert Mueller went to war carrying David Hackett’s memory with him.

There it is. The call of duty. To country. To the dead. To his own code and conscience, forged in a tradition that, I am afraid, is slipping away from us.

Something has gone out of the making of American men and (less so) of American women.

What has actually gone out is not the men and women themselves—Mueller's type is still being made, in the Marines, in public service, in firehouses, in countless unrecorded lives. You find public virtue in many places in America, to this moment. But what's gone is our memory of how to pass it on.

There was for generations in this country a kind of cultural transmission system, a heritage of practices, teachings, and shared values that helped to forge public virtue. That system had several core components: a robust education in civics and republican morality that taught the tradition consciously; a shared media culture that honored the tradition publicly; a political culture in which leaders of both parties embodied enough of the tradition to reinforce it; and a literary and religious culture that gave the tradition its deepest roots.

All are damaged in our time. Education in American civics and ideals is under attack from several directions at once. The old, shared media is gone. The nation’s traditional political culture began fracturing in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate—just after Mueller’s character was forged in it—and is now barely recognizable to people who can still remember those “before times.” And the literary and religious cultures that transmitted so much of our ideals—our stories and struggles as a people; the words of the holy books of the great faith traditions, especially the Bible; the whole language and grammar of sacrifice, solidarity, and duty—are no longer a common inheritance of Americans.

Trump didn’t cause this. He is merely the most grotesque symptom of it. It is sad but true: Donald Trump would never have been elected president once, much less twice, in any other time but our own. This is on us.

Robert Mueller never gave a speech about any of these matters. He never wrote a memoir cashing in on his Vietnam service, or his leadership of the FBI, or his final showdown with Trump and MAGA. He never appeared on a stage to receive an award with his hand over his heart and the camera lingering. He wasn’t that kind of man. That kind of American man.

So President Trump’s social-media post reacting to Mueller’s death is certainly cruel (think of his widow, his family and friends), and it is despicable. But it’s more than that. It’s a confession of a kind of blindness. Trump genuinely does not know what he is looking at.

And there are millions of young men growing up believing that Donald Trump is American manhood.

Still, I remain an optimist about America. The central claim of my basic political argument is that—Most Americans Are Still Normal. I think that is not a prayer or a wish but a provable proposition. The traditions are damaged, not dead. Mueller’s type is still being made, at every level of society. The Bronze Star is still being earned. The question for us is: Can we live by those virtues—and pass them on, forging new systems of transmission, new channels?

Our poem today is one of the most famous, and most quoted, in the English language. Let it be a tribute to the kind of man Robert Mueller was, and a promise to be, and to raise, men and women in that same tradition.

—Terry

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss;If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!