President Trump Takes Christians to School

Heath Lambert

Donald Trump and Robert Mueller

On March 20, 2026, Robert Mueller, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Special Prosecutor, died at 81 after a battle with Parkinson’s Disease. That announcement would have made the news under any circumstances. But the news got even bigger on March 21, when President Donald Trump commented on Mueller’s death, writing on social media, “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he's dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

These comments are clearly wrong and way over any reasonable line for how responsible people should communicate. The response of general disgust over the president’s comments indicate that most people agree with this. In fact, admitting that the president’s comments were wrong should be fairly easy work.

The harder work is to take a more careful look at the comments and learn the many lessons they teach us. When President Trump made his nasty comments about Robert Mueller, he took Christians to school and taught us several lessons about communication in a fallen world.

Jesus Calls Us to Love Our Enemies

The first lesson has to do with the main reason why Trump’s comments were wrong. They were a violation of Jesus’s command in Matthew 5:44 when he says, “I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

What is amazing about Jesus’s comments here is that he does not deny that we will encounter people who persecute and mistreat us. His teaching is far more radical than that. Jesus calls us to look honestly at our enemies, to be honest about their wickedness, and then, instead of hating them, we are to respond with compassion.

These words apply to everyone on earth whether a president or a peasant. We need to say this because there is a temptation for some to excuse President Trump because he has big and powerful enemies that rest of us cannot understand. This was the argument of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday when defended the presidential remarks saying, “Given what has been done to President Trump it is impossible for . . . us to understand what he has been through.” None of us should pretend that we have experienced the kind of treatment as President Trump. I know I haven’t. But the Christian condemnation of Trump’s speech is not grounded in anyone’s experience but in the words of Jesus Christ that demand love for enemies.

Loving Your Enemies Is Hard

The second lesson we can learn from Trump’s comments is that loving your enemies is hard to do. That is true because our enemies really do cruelly mistreat and persecute us. The president pointed to this reality in his unfortunate post. He did not just express delight over Mueller’s death, but also made a moral argument. Trump said of Mueller that, “He can no longer hurt innocent people.” The president’s argument is very clearly that because Mueller used his life to hurt people it is good that his life is over.

This is an argument we need to take seriously. When people mistreat us, it will not be hard for us to make an argument that hatred for them is the right response. Jesus makes this clear in his comments the verse before his command to love our enemies. He says in Matthew 5:43, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’”

Jesus not only acknowledges the existence of enemies, but he also makes clear that some religious communities teach that hatred is an acceptable response to them. When Donald Trump spewed hatred at one of his enemies this week, he was behaving in a way consistent with some of the religious people that Jesus condemned. It is a testimony to just how terrible enemies can be that it is so easy for everyone from presidents to religious leaders to slip into hateful attitudes.

That is why we all need to be very careful in our evaluation of the president’s remarks. The president may have provided the most famous example last week of enemy hatred, but he is far from alone. Christians really do have a responsibility to be honest that what the president said was wrong. We also have a responsibility to be honest that the same hatred has flowed out of our own hearts. That is because hating your enemies is easy for all of us. Loving them requires the grace of Jesus.

In a Sinful World Death Can Be a Cause for Gratitude

A third lesson we can learn from the presidential remarks is the very uncomfortable one that there are times in a sinful world where death can be a cause of gratitude and joy. It has been common for many responding to Trump to say this kind of celebration is never an appropriate response to death. This creates a standard that most people will not be able to sustain.

In this messed up world there are times when death is good news. For example, many different kinds of people will express joy or relief when the state executes, by lethal injection, a murderer who robbed innocent victims of life, when a military strike kills a despot who terrorized a nation, or when a car accident ends the existence of a man sexually abusing a young girl for years.

The awkward truth is that death can be good news when it brings unrighteousness to an end. The very important point is that any legitimate joy and gratitude that comes from

those deaths will not flow from the fact that the deceased person was an enemy of any one person in particular, but rather from the fact that they were enemies of righteousness. The Bible makes it clear in places like Genesis 9:6, that the life of human beings is so precious that anyone who becomes devoted to the destruction of that life is themselves to be devoted to destruction.

As true as this is, Christians must be very careful to reserve expressions of gratitude over death for the most rare occasions involving the most corrupt individuals. The death of Robert Mueller is not one of those occasions, regardless of your political opinion. I have no doubt that Trump considers Mueller to have been a bona fide enemy, and that the president could make a solid case for legitimate grievances he has against the man. But when we measure a whole life, we should not reduce entire persons to a single issue or one season of life. This means that Christians cannot—and the president should not—reduce Mueller to one political context, regardless of how consequential it was. Robert Mueller was a husband, father, and grandfather. He had next door neighbors and friends. Colleagues at work loved and respected him.

Loving our enemies requires us to see them as something more than people who mistreated us. That requires us not only to listen to Jesus’s command about loving our enemies, but to his teaching about the Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12, “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” Very practically, Jesus’s words here require us to evaluate the lives of others the way we wish others would evaluate ours. That means, at the absolute least, that we do not speak about people as though the way they may have mistreated us is the only thing true about them.

We All Need to Watch What We Say

Finally, Donald Trump’s remarks give us a lesson about how we use our mouths. Cherishing hatred in our hearts is one sin. Allowing that hatred to cross our lips is another. Of course, the president verbalized his hate on a global stage, but this kind of hateful expression is also wrong when any of us do it in our living rooms and text threads.

Psalm 141:3 says, “Set a guard, O LORD, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips!” None of us have a right to say just anything we want. We are required by God to use care in our speech. This may be the requirement in Scripture that Donald Trump violates more regularly than any other.

A Lesson of What Not to Do

I know my comments about the president’s remarks will make some unhappy. Plenty of conservatives in general and Christians in particular think it is wrong to criticize the president since it potentially weakens his political support as he does battle against people who oppose his policies and are also guilty of sin.

I grant that the president’s opponents’ sin plenty and I have been more than willing to criticize them and defend the president when he deserved it. But he doesn’t deserve it this week. This week he deserves a clear rebuke. We Christians need to remember that Donald Trump has a little less than three years to be president. Believers need to communicate in ways that preserve our credibility when Trump is permanently out of public office. That means it is important to be honest when the president is right and when he is wrong.

If you don’t like the sound of that, then consider that this kind of talk only hurts the president. One of the reasons for Trump’s election is that people appreciate his bold candor. But none but the vilest people want this kind of hateful rhetoric. The American public is already tiring of it. It is this kind of talk that will make people eager for the president to leave office even when they agree with him on policy because they just don’t want to keep hearing this stuff.

This week, the president was really wrong. We need say that not because we want to score points. We need to say it because we need to be honest, because this kind of talk is really bad for our society, and because the president’s public sin has lessons we can all apply to our more-private sin.

With his comments about Robert Mueller, the president took Christians to school. Unfortunately, this week, our lessons were taught by someone who earned a Ph.D. in what not to do.