There’s no good, clean way out of the latest controversy to hit the Trump White House. Amid a days-long discussion about his willingness to call the families of armed service members killed in the line of duty, President Trump called the family of one Sgt. La David Johnson, one of the Green Berets killed earlier this month during a counterterrorism operation in the African nation of Niger.
According to Florida congresswoman Frederica Wilson, a Democrat who was with Johnson’s widow and parents during the call Tuesday, the president was insensitive and told the grieving family that the 25-year-old soldier “knew what he was getting into when he signed up” for the Army. Johnson’s adoptive mother has since corroborated Wilson’s account of the call. “Trump did disrespect my son,” she said.
But President Trump Wednesday morning said Wilson “totally fabricated” her story about the phone call and said he had “proof” of this. Later, to reporters, Trump said, “I didn’t say what that congresswoman said. Didn’t say it at all—she knows it.” Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, however, admitted in her Wednesday briefing that the White House does not have a recording of the call. “There were several people in the room from the administration that were on the call, including the chief of staff, General John Kelly,” she said.
Sanders also defended the president’s tone on the call without confirming or denying he made the “knew what he was getting into” comment. “The president’s call, as accounted by multiple people in the room, believe that the president was completely respectful, very sympathetic, and expressed the condolences of himself and the rest of the country, and thanked the family for their service, commended them for having an American hero in their family,” she said.
So what’s the truth? Given the non-denials from the White House, it’s likely Trump said something like what he’s been accused of saying. Was it insensitive? That’s in the ear of the beholder, and different people react and interpret things differently in times of tragedy.
However Trump meant his comment, his subsequent war of words with Wilson doesn’t help assuage the pain Sgt. Johnson’s family feels—nor, for that matter, does the way in which Wilson, a Democrat, went public with the family’s complaints. One of his predecessors in the Oval Office offered a lesson for how Trump should deal better with this kind of reaction from the grieving loved ones of fallen soldiers:
In her book, Dana Perino recounted the first time she visited Walter Reed hospital with President George W. Bush to meet with wounded servicemen there. Most were grateful and overjoyed to have a visit from the president, but Perino describes one mother who “yelled at the president, wanting to know why it was her child and not his who lay in that hospital bed.” Bush, she wrote, “just stood and took it.”
One More Thing—There’s a lot we don’t know about the circumstances surrounding the death of Sgt. Johnson and three other American soldiers in Niger on October 4. I’m told the mission was part of a French-led counterterrorism operation in the Sahel region, a belt of semi-arid land south of the Sahara.
The relative lack of information about the American presence there has raised some questions about why President Trump himself had not spoken publicly about the loss of four American lives until this week. A Politico article published Wednesday insinuated some kind of downplaying of the operation when it produced a paper statement from the president that had been drafted on October 5—but never released publicly. “The statement was circulated among NSC officials as well as Defense Department officials. But it was never released, and it was not immediately clear why,” reports Politico.
But on that same day, Sarah Sanders began her briefing with a similarly worded statement about the deaths. “Yesterday, three U.S. servicemembers and one partner nation member were killed while providing assistance to counterterror operations. As many of you are aware, U.S. forces are in the country to provide training and security assistance to the local armed forces in their efforts to counter violent extremist organizations. Additionally, two U.S. servicemembers were injured and evacuated in stable condition to Germany,” she said.
I’m told the draft paper statement was scrapped in favor of Sanders’s in-person statement from the podium.
Education Watch—My colleague Alice Lloyd is a former teacher, and in a terrific piece gently criticizes the decision by the Biloxi Public Schools to drop Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from the eighth grade curriculum. A school official there argues that some of the language used in the novel “made people uncomfortable” and that the lessons could be taught from other books. Here’s part of Alice’s rebuttal:
Read the whole thing here.
It looks like we have an answer on whether President Trump supports the bipartisan effort to reinstate reimbursement payments to health insurers. Here’s what he tweeted Wednesday morning:
I am supportive of Lamar as a person & also of the process, but I can never support bailing out ins co’s who have made a fortune w/ O’Care.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2017
Asked at her Wednesday briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders attempted to clarify. “We’ve said all along that we want something that doesn’t just bail out the insurance companies, but actually provides relief for all Americans, and this bill doesn’t address that fact,” she said, adding that the deal, brokered by Republican Lamar Alexander and Democrat Patty Murray, is a “good step in the right direction” on the issue.
“This president certainly supports Republicans and Democrats coming to work together,” Sanders said. “But it’s not a full approach, and we need something to go a little bit further to get onboard.”
A little bit further, how? “He wants to lower premiums, he wants to provide greater flexibility, he wants to drive competition, he likes the idea of block grants to states. Those are a lot of the ideas that he’d like to see in a health-care plan,” she said. That’s an ideal health-care reform package for President Trump, but the more immediate issue since his administration last week ended reimbursements to insurers selling to lower-income Americans is the stabilization of the insurance market—supposedly a goal of the administration.
In August, an official told journalists the administration wanted to return stability to the insurance market. Presumably, that desire is what fueled the president to call Alexander, the GOP chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, over a week ago to encourage him to find a solution. Trump said on Tuesday that he had been working with Alexander and Murray in some capacity on a fix, despite blasting the payments themselves as a “gravy train” for insurers just a few days before.
I’ve asked the White House for further clarification on any of this, and what the president’s involvement was in working on the deal that he now says is incomplete. I’ve yet to receive a response.
Mark It Down—“Not yet.” —Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on whether NAFTA is “dead,” October 18, 2017
Feature of the Day—“Toby Keith in Trump’s America,” by Spencer Kornhaber in the Atlantic
Song of the Day—“Heartless” by Kanye West
