Boston Herald
Paul Monti never mentioned the president’s name once yesterday afternoon. He didn’t have to. The anger and the pain in his voice said it all.
“If you know anything about the Gold Star community,” Paul Monti told me, “then you know that we are a non-political group of grieving parents who do not want the deaths of our children to be turned into a political football.”
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But that is exactly what our vainglorious president has managed to do. Only Donald Trump, whose idea of empathy is tossing rolls of paper towels to hurricane victims, could twist the return of a fallen Green Beret into an opportunity to pat himself on the back.
The arrival of Army Sgt. La David Johnson’s body in Miami on Tuesday, two weeks after he was killed in Niger along with three of his fellow soldiers, forced Trump to explain his delay in acknowledging their sacrifice. The president said he had written letters to the families and they’d be going out in the mail.
“I feel very, very badly about that,” Trump said. “The toughest calls I have to make are calls where this happens. Soldiers are killed. It’s a very difficult thing.”
So much for empathy, the rest was undiluted Trump.
“If you look at President Obama and other presidents,” he said, “a lot of them didn’t make calls. I don’t know if he (Obama) did. I was told he didn’t. A lot of presidents don’t. I like to make calls.”
Trump should have stopped there. But he couldn’t. On Tuesday, Trump placed a call to Sgt. Johnson’s widow, Myeshia Johnson, and his mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, on a car speakerphone as they drove to the airport to receive the body, along with their congresswoman, Federica Wilson, a Democrat.
What our 45th president managed to do was compound this Gold Star family’s grief. Sgt. Johnson’s widow, who happens to be six months pregnant with their third child, said the president couldn’t remember, or didn’t know her husband’s name.
And Johnson’s mother backed up Wilson’s claim that Trump tried to console the family by reminding them that their son “knew what he was signing up for.”
Lovely.
Only someone as shameless as Donald Trump could turn a solemn moment of tribute and consolation into such a crass attempt at political gamesmanship.
He even had the audacity to challenge reporters to call his chief of staff, former Marine Gen. John Kelly, and ask if Obama called him regarding the death of his son.
Last year, before the Mass. Fallen Heroes memorial was dedicated on the South Boston Waterfront, I was privileged to see both the pain and pride in John Kelly’s eyes as he haltingly spoke to me about his son’s sacrifice. I can’t imagine he wanted his boss to throw that out there as an emblem of his own vanity.
In fact, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at yesterday’s White House press briefing that Kelly is “disgusted and frustrated” by the way his son’s death has become politicized.
On June 21, 2006, Army Sgt. Jared C. Monti made the ultimate sacrifice in the mountains of Afghanistan. Three years later, he was awarded the Medal of Honor and his parents, Paul and Janet Monti, were escorted into the Oval Office
“All I can tell you,” Paul Monti told a CNN reporter Tuesday night, “is that both Barack and Michelle Obama showed my wife and I a tremendous degree of compassion. It’s a moment I will never forget.”
