Why Trump Just Accused a Grieving War Widow of Lying
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Donald Trump took his reflexive posturing about his superior capacity for empathy a step further on Monday morning. Minutes after Myeshia Johnson, the widow of U.S. Army Sergeant La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger earlier this month, appeared on Good Morning America to say she was upset because the president struggled to “remember my husband’s name” during his condolence phone call last week, Trump took to Twitter to accuse Johnson of lying about their conversation. “I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!” he tweeted.
Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who was accompanying Johnson to Dover Air Force Base last Tuesday when the president called, heard parts of Trump’s phone call with the grieving Gold Star widow over speakerphone and later accused Trump of making insensitive comments. “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,” Wilson said during an interview with MSNBC. According to Wilson, who is a family friend of the Johnsons, the president told Johnson, “He knew what he signed up for, but when it happens it hurts anyway.” Johnson’s mother confirmed Wilson’s account of the conversation, telling The Washington Post that Trump “did disrespect my son,” but ”Trump nevertheless lashed out at Wilson via Twitter last week, calling her a “liar.”
Wilson’s account of the phone call was “100 percent correct,” Johnson told George Stephanopoulos Monday on Good Morning America. “He couldn’t remember my husband’s name,” she said. “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. I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband’s name, and that hurt me the most because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risks his life for our country, why can’t you remember his name?”
Following the perverse logic of Trumpism, it was only a matter of time before the president clashed with Myeshia Johnson herself. A less narcissistic or more empathetic president would have known to leave well enough alone, but for the past week, Trump had been edging closer to a direct confrontation, pushed by each question from the media into more self-destructive territory. Asked why he had not spoken up earlier about the Niger ambush in which Johnson and three other Special Forces troops lost their lives, his instinct was to attack presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama for not contacting as many families of the dead—a lie that he papered over by turning his chief of staff’s own dead son into a political prop.
Each time, the White House has struggled to contain the damage from the president’s rampaging ego: the Trump administration is now reportedly rush shipping condolence letters, desperately looking up contact information for Gold Star families who hadn’t actually received calls from the president. Myeshia Johnson, who has now too been slandered by the president, would surely rather be left alone.
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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