Reading Marc Fisher and Sari Horwitz’s extraordinary article comparing the lives of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and President Trump made me realize that the war between the two men is not just a struggle over the fate of this presidency. It is a battle for the soul of America, because each of them represents a recognizable American archetype.

Mueller was born to wealth and attended elite institutions — St. Paul’s School, Princeton University, the University of Virginia School of Law — but felt compelled to serve his country. During the Vietnam War, when most of his classmates were avoiding the draft, he volunteered for the Marine Corps and earned numerous decorations leading a rifle platoon in fierce combat. Returning home, he became a prosecutor and eventually ran the Justice Department’s criminal division. In the 1990s Mueller went into private practice. It was lucrative, but he hated it. Watching the spike of drug-driven murders in the District of Columbia, he volunteered to become a line prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office. It was as if a retired general had volunteered to serve as a private in wartime.

Mueller is the best of America; Trump the worst. All you need to know about the diseased state of today’s Republican Party is that it reviles Mueller and reveres Trump. Hitherto the champions of personal responsibility and rectitude, Republicans have embraced a culture of self-indulgence that they denounced when it was symbolized by Trump’s fellow draft-dodger Bill Clinton. This shift in the tectonic plates of the culture may long outlast the current administration.

...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-vs-mueller-is-a-battle-for-americas-soul/2018/02/26/0979904c-1b19-11e8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html?utm_term=.e875dea40b49