My first thought upon reading what President Donald Trump said about the death of Robert Mueller was: Ugh. My second thought was: I wish Melania or Susie Wiles had snatched his phone.

“Robert Mueller just died,” posted Trump. “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

Marine, longtime FBI director, and career public servant Robert Mueller, who in the post-9/11 years remade the FBI’s mission from crime-fighting to terrorist-fighting but who will forever be known as the figurehead namesake of a 22-month, $32 million investigation of the Russia collusion hoax, passed away on Friday night at age 81.

Then I had my third thought: Good, I’m glad he said it.

Why? Because once again, by being brutally honest, Donald Trump is forcing a historical reckoning. He’s forcing the American people and, to a lesser extent, an inquisitive subsection of our nation’s media, to ask, Why on earth would an American president say such an awful thing about a longtime public servant who worked in both Republican and Democrat administrations?

The short answer is that Trump viewed Mueller as his chief persecutor, as Torquemada without the rack. And an honest accounting of the Mueller probe’s over-the-top investigative methods bears this out.

The Appropriated Press spilled more than 1,800 glowing words on Mueller, but not one of those words was “Parkinson’s,” which is the name of the neurological disease that afflicted Mueller in the later years of his life. Indeed, Mueller’s family last year told The New York Times that he’d been “diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the summer of 2021.”

This, I think, explains a lot about the Mueller investigation — especially why its namesake looked so debilitated during his July 2019 testimony before Congress about the report that bore his name. As columnist David Harsanyi wrote at the time, “Mueller didn’t know where some of the most infamous quotes in his own report had emanated. He claimed to be unfamiliar with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, the Clinton — and DNC — funded contractors who originated and then propelled the Trump-Russian collusion theory.”

Clearly, Mueller was already cognitively addled when the shameless and ever-calculating Democrats used his appointment by fellow Bush Republican and acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to lend artificial legitimacy to the Russia collusion hoax.

As for those “innocent people” Trump mentioned in his brief eulogy, he was no doubt talking about people like Lieutenant General Mike Flynn and former Trump advisers Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and George Papadopoulos — all of whom were raked over the coals and nearabout bankrupted by Mueller and his henchmen. Indeed, putting the septuagenarian Manafort in solitary confinement was incredibly vicious and vindictive and unforgivable. And terrorizing Stone with an armed early-morning raid of his house, in clear collusion with CNN, was equally unforgivable.

Same with Mueller’s prosecution of Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor. As the AP tells it, “[Trump Attorney General William] Barr made clear his own disagreements with the foundations of the Russia investigation, moving to dismiss a false-statements prosecution that Mueller had brought against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, even though that investigation ended in a guilty plea.”

What the AP doesn’t tell us, of course, is that Mueller and his henchmen extracted a guilty plea out of Flynn by threatening to go after his son on a completely unrelated matter.

Stay classy, Bob.

In perhaps the most memorable language of the report, Mueller pointedly noted, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

Translation: Trump is guilty, but since I can’t prove it, I’m just going to insinuate it before I slink away.

What a sleazy, scummy thing to say. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that comment was penned by a sleazy, scummy, Trump-deranged Democrat operator who was calling the shots of an investigation whose namesake was in the throes of Parkinson’s disease. Someone like, oh, Andrew Weissman.

Trump’s comments on Mueller, harsh as they were, are a Rorschach test for your feelings about many things — about the Russia collusion hoax, about Robert Mueller, about Donald Trump, and about the dirty Democrat politics that brought all this about in the first place.

Remember: It was Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, who colluded with the Russians in an attempt to rig the outcome of the 2016 election. It was Hillary Clinton who used DNC funds funneled through Fusion GPS to finance a Trump-deranged British spook to cook up a phony dossier of unverified falsehoods from Russian stooges.

One brutal meme summed things up succinctly: It showed Mueller sitting at a table next to Barack Obama saying, “I tried to find dirt on Trump, but everything led back to you and Hillary.”