Writing at the Federalist, Susan Kristol reflects on the sacrifices made by the parents of those members of the military deployed into or killed in combat—and suggests Donald Trump should have responded much more empathetically to the appearance of two such parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, at the Democratic National Convention last week.
Here’s an excerpt:
When your son or daughter is in a combat zone, you do not sleep except with a telephone next to the pillow. You can’t decide if you should obsessively follow the news or avoid watching it. You break into sobs while driving down the highway. You can’t listen to country music songs about Arlington Cemetery, you have unaccountable fits of anger when a well-intentioned person asks if the troops get to come home for the holidays, and you hear your child’s voice via a static-filled satellite phone line only once in eight months. You know someone in the battalion has been killed when all outgoing emails are shut down so the bereaved family can be notified, and you swing between sadness for them and terrible relief that it’s not your child. The Khan parents were making the point that Muslims do serve honorably and courageously in the American military, and that Trump was wrong to disparage every person of their faith and question their patriotism in such a blanket manner. It was a dramatic moment. I am no legal scholar, and Khan may or may not be correct about whether Trump’s immigration proposals are constitutional—hard to judge because the wording of the proposals changes so often—but those Trump supporters who are now debating the legal or constitutional points Khan was making are merely trying to deflect attention from the shocking lack of compassion their candidate displayed after that speech. A decent person should have learned that the first and most important thing one can say to a grieving parent is, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Rather than expressing sympathy for the loss of Captain Khan, or even mentioning his death in battle, Trump’s first reactions were to criticize Mrs. Khan for not speaking, imply it was related to Islam’s demeaning treatment of women, and assert he has also sacrificed a lot (citing his hard work for his own business): “I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.” Had Trump behaved in a manner befitting a man who aspires to become our commander in chief, it might be time to move on to a discussion of whether a ban on Muslim immigration is constitutional, or whether building a wall is a good policy idea. But he did not, and his scores of surrogates and apologists continue to find ways to excuse him by deflecting attention to Hillary Clinton and Benghazi, or Cindy Sheehan, or the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and unchecked immigration.
Read the whole thing here.
