Widow of US soldier ‘hurt’ by Trump call

THE pregnant widow of an American soldier killed in an ambush in Niger said on Monday that Donald Trump struggled to remember his name during a condolence call, in an account the president immediately disputed.

Trump’s call to Myeshia Johnson, whose husband Sergeant La David Johnson was one of four US soldiers killed in the October 4 jihadist attack, has generated a storm of controversy and comes as questions swirl over how the attack happened.

“Yes, the president said that he knew what he signed up for, but it hurts anyways,” Johnson said on ABC’s Good Morning America TV programme, in her first public comments on the death of her 25-year-old husband.

“It made me cry because I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said it.”

Myeshia Johnson, who is carrying the couple’s third child, said she “heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband’s name and that hurt me the most”.

“The only way he remembered my husband’s name because he told me he had my husband’s report in front of him and that’s when he actually said La David,” she said.

The US president fired back on Twitter, insisting: “I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!”

Details of Trump’s call were made public last week by a Democratic congresswoman who claimed the president had offended Johnson’s widow, drawing accusations from the White House of politicising the issue.

The escalating row, now heading into its second week, prompted Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, a former general whose son died in Afghanistan, to deliver an emotive defence of the president – while lashing out at the Florida congresswoman, Frederica Wilson.

Myeshia Johnson told ABCWilson’s account of the call was “100 percent correct”, saying she was a lifelong family friend and had listened in over speakerphone.

“Whatever Miss Wilson said was not fabricated,” Johnson said. “Why would we fabricate something like that?” Asked if she had any words for the president, she replied: “No. I don’t have nothing to say to him.”

The dispute comes amid questions over exactly what happened ahead of the ambush, and the military response afterward. General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “we owe the American people an explanation of what their men and women were doing at this particular time”.