Day 277: Gold Star Widow Confirms Trump Couldn’t Recall Her Husband’s Name

Myeshia Johnson — widow to Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger earlier this month — confirmed to Good Morning America that Donald Trump could not remember her husband’s name during a phone call last week.

“He couldn’t remember my husband’s name. The only way he remembered my husband’s name because he told me he had my husband report in front of him and that’s when he actually said ‘La David.’ I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband name,” she said. “And that’s what hurt me the most because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risks his life for our country, why can’t you remember his name? And that’s what made me upset and cry even more because my husband was an awesome soldier.”

She stated that Trump’s call left her “very, very upset and hurt” and that his words and manner had “made me cry even worse.”

Trump, meanwhile, has decided to use this moment to get into a fight with yet another gold star family. During his campaign, Trump attacked Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son, Cpt. Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq in 2004. Trump, in trying to compare suffering between himself and the Khans, proclaimed that building skyscrapers and creating jobs was also a form of suffering.

Here, Trump disputed Johnson’s recounting of their conversation.

A bigger man would simply apologize for adding further pain to a widow’s grief, reach out privately to Johnson or simply let this go without additional public statement. Instead, Trump kept the story going by sending out Chief of Staff John Kelly as a prop to speak to the media last week and the administration has continually attempted to turn this into a partisan issue.

Today, Trump proclaimed that he spoke Sgt. Johnson’s name from the beginning of the conversation like that’s some sort of moral victory. He further failed to address the fact that he made a widow feel, somehow, even worse than she did already.

277 days in, 1185 to go

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