John Dingell

Brian Dickerson, Tribune news service

It is a truth grimly acknowledged by veterans of armed combat that soldiers under fire, like infants and incontinent nursing home residents, are sometimes helpless to control their bodily functions.

That is the inglorious phenomenon viewers witnessed Wednesday night when a president under siege fouled himself in a spasmodic outburst of indecency, lashing out on live television against a deceased Michigan congressman and his still-grieving widow.

Donald Trump had steeled himself for the inevitability of impeachment, making sure that he would be surrounded by worshipful supporters when the hour of his humiliation struck. He rallied his flock in the congressional district represented by US Rep. Justin Amash, the renegade Republican who renounced his party and risked his reelection to stand with Trump’s congressional accusers.

But when news alerts confirmed the worst, Trump vented his spleen not on the principled Amash but on the late John Dingell and his wife, Debbie, who succeeded her husband after he completed a record 59-year career in the US House of Representatives.

Heaping calumny on the recently departed is hardly a new look for Trump, whose campaign to defame Republican rival John McCain has only intensified since the latter succumbed to cancer in 2018.

But even Trump knew better than to deny Dingell the dignified funeral his unique stature and record tenure demanded. When Dingell passed earlier this year, the president arranged for his burial at Arlington National Cemetery, an honour that would likely have taken weeks or months to arrange without the president’s personal intercession.

Wednesday night, Trump appeared to regret at that rare lapse of decency, noting that Debbie Dingell had voted to impeach him even after he gave her late husband “the A treatment.”

In a bitter digression from his rambling address, the president recalled that the Dearborn congresswoman phoned to thank him for ordering that flags flown at half-staff and streamlining arrangements for her husband’s burial in Arlington.

“She calls me up: ‘That’s the nicest thing that ever happened. Thank you so much. John would be so thrilled. He’s looking down. He’d be so thrilled,’” Trump quoted the congresswoman as saying.

Then Trump added, “Maybe he’s looking up. I don’t know. ... But let’s assume he’s looking down.”

Like so much of the slander he spews, Trump’s insinuation that Debbie Dingell’s gratitude was counterfeit or hypocritical is flagrantly false. I know this because she expressed the same heartfelt appreciation for Trump’s intercession in private conversations with me and dozens of others sceptical of the president’s capacity for generosity.

But in Trump’s ethically disordered world, the congresswoman’s principled and reluctant vote for impeachment is a betrayal, a refusal to acknowledge the debt she incurred when Trump deigned to treat her, in his imperial munificence, like the grieving widow she was.

Thursday morning, a stunned Debbie Dingell responded with a restrained tweet that implored Trump to “set politics aside” and confessed that the president’s “hurtful words just made my healing much harder.”

A few hours later, Dingell told me that she had been cheered by the backing of Republican colleagues such as Rep. Fred Upton and Paul Mitchell, both of whom called on Trump to apologise. But White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham shrugged off those appeals. “I think we all know,” she observed, “the president is a counter-puncher.”

To linger on the president’s indecency would be to belabour the obvious. And though Trump protests that he’s often the hapless victim of his own infantile impulsivity, there may be method in its latest manifestation. Whether premeditated or improvised, his attack on the Dingells was surely intended to distract viewers from the signal event — impeachment — that will forever stain his presidential legacy.