Has Trump no decency?
T
he single most solemn responsibility of the President of the United States is serving as commander in chief — sending men and women off to battle, and comforting families when they fall. Self-serving, insensitive, demagogic Donald Trump has dragged the sacred duty through the mud, demeaning the sacrifice of troops and insulting grieving Gold Star families.
He did it last year during the election campaign, against the family of Capt. Humayun Khan. Now suffering from his attention is the family of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, one of the four Green Berets killed in an ambush in Niger in West Africa nearly two weeks ago.
The fiasco started Monday, when a reporter asked Trump a wholly legitimate question: Why had he yet to comment on the Green Berets?
Rather than answering, the President said he had written letters to the families and planned to call them, an assertion followed by a false and base smear of other occupants of the office.
“If you look at President Obama and other Presidents, most of them didn’t make calls,” he said. “I like to call when it’s appropriate.”
That Trump flatly lied about Obama and other predecessors is galling enough. What’s more depressingly revealing is that he had an immediate, unseemly instinct to promote his supposedly perfect patriotism by dragging others down, and using Gold Star families as pawns in the process.
Yet when the criticism of this cheap move came, rather than admit he had flubbed Trump — a portrait in vainglory, a picture of vindictiveness — compounded the sin, using to his own ends the death of the son of his chief of staff, then-Marine Gen. John Kelly.
“I think I’ve called every family of someone who’s died,” adding: “You could ask Gen. Kelly, did he get a call from Obama?” said Trump, suggesting that after his son, Marine Second Lt. Robert Kelly, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, Obama never reached out.
We leave aside for now whether and how Obama sought to comfort Lt. Kelly’s family. Perhaps he wrote a letter. Perhaps he called his widow, Heather, and not his father. Perhaps he failed on all fronts — though this is unlikely, for John Kelly and his wife attended a May 2011 breakfast for Gold Star families at Obama’s White House.
What is beyond all bounds of decency is that the President casually used a private man’s deepest pain as a political weapon.
Embedded in Trump’s smarmy swagger was yet another lie: Contrary to his claim that he’s “called every family,” the Associated Press Wednesday identified relatives of two soldiers who died overseas this year who never got a call or a letter from Trump, and one who got a letter but no call.
A review by the Washington Post found “about half” of 13 Gold Star families contacted said Trump never called them.
Which brings us, with sickness in our gut that this is even a topic of conversation, to Trump’s call to Myeshia Johnson, widow of Sgt. Johnson.
When the call came in, she was in a car with Sgt. Johnson’s mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, and Rep. Frederica Wilson. Both say that Trump, rather than console the widow, upset her greatly by telling her that her husband “must have known what he signed up for.”
Said Wilson: “She was crying the whole time, and when she hung up the phone, she looked at me and said, ‘He didn’t even remember his name.’ That’s the hurting part.”
Trump shot back, on Twitter, that the congresswoman “totally fabricated” his remarks, “and I have proof.” That proof turned out to be the word of staffers in the room at the time.
La David Johnson’s memory, and the memories of fellow Green Berets Bryan Black, Jeremiah Johnson and Dustin Wright, remain unsullied. They are American heroes. But through his own sickness, our President has dragged the rest of us deep into degrading muck.