Once again, Donald J. Trump, our commander-in-chief,
thanks to the mathematical vagaries of the Electoral College, is in a dispute
involving the family of a service member killed in combat. This time, the
controversy stems from a phone call Trump made to Myeshia Johnson, wife of Army
Sergeant La David Johnson, who was killed in an ISIS ambush in the African
country of Niger recently.
According to Representative Frederica Wilson (D, FL),
Trump told the widow that Sergeant Johnson “knew what he signed up for, but I
guess it still hurt.” Trump, as he is prone to do, went immediately on the
offensive, tweeting that the representative’s account was a total fabrication.
White House chief of staff, John Kelly, a former
marine whose son was killed in combat in Afghanistan, went
public to ‘explain’ the situation and ‘defend’ the president, and in the
process exposed Trump for the liar we all know him to be. According to Kelly,
Trump tried his level best to ‘communicate warmly, with empathy.’ In his
remarks, Kelly alludes to the fact that Trump did indeed use language similar
to that claimed by Wilson, but added that he was stunned and broken-hearted by
her conveying these details to the media.
This is a lot of he-said, she-said, with both sides
digging in. Just to keep the smoke swirling, I’d like to add a possible third
scenario for consideration.
It is possible that Trump did want to be warm and
caring in his calls to the families of the deceased, but you must remember that
we’re dealing here with Donald J. Trump, former reality TV personality whose
catch phrase is ‘you’re fired,’ and who was coached by former McCarthy-era
lawyer to deal with criticism by attacking with overwhelming force. Trump, to
my knowledge, has never shown empathy in his life, and is incapable of considering
anyone’s feelings but his own. Added to this, anyone who has listened to him
speak when he’s not reading prepared remarks, has to have noticed that he is
not the most erudite of people. He rambles, repeats, utters unconnected
sentences, and pretty much says whatever pops into his mind. I, for one, can
easily imagine him on the phone, without a written script, saying something
along the lines of what he’s accused of saying, and thinking to himself—if he
ever thinks while he’s talking—that this is a pretty neat thing to say.
During my time in the army, I served on occasion as a
casualty assistance officer, a duty that required me to interact with the
families of soldiers killed in Vietnam. I can tell you, in situations like
this, you’re walking on egg shells. The wrong word, and the wrong time, or in
the wrong way, given the grief these people are experiencing, can blow up in
your face. Even for those of us with military experience, it was often
difficult to find the right way to say the right thing. Trump, whose military
experience consists of being exiled to a military school where he apparently
didn’t even learn bugle calls, can hardly be expected to understand the sense
of loss involved here.
Here’s where the real problem is, in my humble
opinion. Rather than acknowledging that he might have expressed himself less
sympathetically than required, apologizing for any grief his words caused, and
moving on, Trump did what Trump does whenever anyone criticizes him—he attacked
like a wounded pit bull, and began hurling accusations. Liar, liar, pants on
fire, he screams at Wilson. His knee-jerk reaction is yet another example of a
man who is not a deep thinker, not even a medium deep thinker, for whom the
truth is whatever he says, and anyone or anything contradicting him is ‘fake.’
In this case, it’s his pants that are burning. And, it’s
his inability to reflect on his words and actions, his refusal to take
responsibility for his shortcomings or admit that sometimes he’s just . . .
wrong, that lit the match.
I almost feel sorry for John Kelly. His sense of
loyalty to his boss seems to have trumped (no pun intended, really) his sense
of integrity. While he didn’t explicitly lie, his mealy-mouth defense of Trump
came close, perilously close to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment