President Trump and his defenders blame the ongoing flap over a soldier's widow on the "Fake News Media." Perhaps because Trump has been a Democrat most of his life, he doesn't realize how futile and irrelevant this criticism is.
A Republican blaming unfair media coverage for his problems is like an engineer blaming gravity for his plane crashing. A good engineer overcomes gravity and good Republican politician learns to deal with a press ideologically arrayed against him.
On Tuesday night, reporters were passing a misleading quote around Twitter. "Trump to widow of Sgt. La David Johnson: ‘He knew what he signed up for,'" one reporter tweeted out. This quote came from a Democratic member of Congress paraphrasing the mother of Johnson, who was in the car with her daughter-in-law when President Trump called — yet it was presented as a direct Trump quote by a reporter, in a tweet retweeted far more than the reporter's subsequent tweets that provided actual facts.
The most likely explanation is that Trump was trying to praise Sgt. Johnson's bravery — that Johnson knew how dangerous this job was and nonetheless took it on. White House chief of staff John Kelly explained in Thursday's emotional briefing that he advised Trump to say as much (although he advised Trump against calling at all) because it was what his son's friends told him over the phone when his son died in Afghanistan in 2010. This likely explanation was mostly ignored by a media drumming up outrage.
Trump is not the smoothest speaker and expressing delicate sentiments has never been his forte. (Recall his "warmest condolences" for the victims of the Las Vegas shooting? Comforting is not comfortable for Trump.) He'd be wise to watch Kelly's entire speech from Thursday to get a sense of how to use the right tone and words to be presidential when discussing tragedies of this gravity.
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05.18.2024