When it comes to the controversy surrounding the White House’s tardy response to an ambush in Niger that killed four U.S. Green Berets, there are no winners.
Not President Trump. Not the reporters and pundits who’ve piled on to criticize the White House’s long response time. Not the members of Congress who’ve basked in the media spotlight with their passionate denunciations of the administration’s handling of this tragedy.
The families of the fallen are getting the worst of it as they’re being made into political pawns by both the pro- and anti-Trump factions.
We’re all losers, and the men who died serving this country deserve better.
President Trump should be ashamed it took him so long to respond to the deadly ambush. There’s no excuse for his days of silence, especially now that it has been revealed his staff drafted a statement of condolence immediately after the attack. Trump should be doubly ashamed that his first public remarks on the fatal Niger incident included the false boast that previous presidents hadn’t called the families of fallen troops. He should also be ashamed that he reportedly brought one of the widows to tears this week with insensitive comments, according to the mother of one of the fallen Green Berets.
The White House should be ashamed it used the death of Marine 1st Lt. Robert Michael Kelly, son of White House chief of staff John Kelly, to score a “gotcha” about how the general didn’t receive a phone call from President Barack Obama in 2010 when his boy was killed in Iraq.
Much of the press’ coverage of Trump’s eventual response to the Niger ambush has also been tone-deaf and callous. It has been loud, sanctimonious, done with little concern for the families and focused almost entirely on the president’s Rose Garden remarks.
It is true Trump was flat-out wrong when he suggested that previous presidents hadn’t phoned the families of troops killed in action. He said as much when he corrected himself on live television!
It was worth getting to the truth of the matter, but the media pile-on that took place after Trump leveled his bogus charge ignored that the Green Berets’ families can see and hear everything we’re saying. Trump’s bogus boast required a rebuttal, but it didn’t require wall-to-wall coverage, complete with the faces of the four deceased service members and details of their deaths.
Did it occur to anyone in the press that it may be painful for the families to see their loved one’s faces plastered everywhere as angry pundits and reporters invoke their names in self-righteous sermons aimed at defending former presidents from the current one?
Trump was caught in an obvious lie, and it’s good that he was corrected. Trump used his eventual response as an opportunity to build himself up with a false statement, and he was rightly called out for it.
But using the Rose Garden incident as an opportunity to jump into something larger about how awful the president is, and hounding the families for comments to validate this story line, is just a different way of turning the Green Berets’ loved ones into political pawns. Hammering away at this story by holding up the grieving families and saying, “Look what you’ve done, Mr. President,” is exploitation by another name.
Let the families mourn in peace.
America is worse off for how this has gone down, and there is no good or bad side. It’s all bad.
