An especially disgusting lie from President Trump's supporters
Mr. Trump denies having said that. I am strongly inclined to believe Rep. Wilson because I do not know her to be a habitual liar. One study during last year's primary campaign showed Mr. Trump- who has insinuated that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex) might have been implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy, insisted long after any doubt had been dispelled that President Obama was not a native-born American citizen, claims without evidence that Mr. Obama had him wiretapped, and routinely makes up "facts" to serve his purposes of the moment- told a lie, on average, once every five minutes.
It was an incredibly insensitive thing for Mr. Trump to say, displaying the very lack of empathy which is a diagnostic criterion for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. That is the point Mr. Trump's critics have been making about the conversation. Granted, he is not the most articulate man in the world and often says unfortunate things simply because he trips over his own tongue. That in itself is a problem in an American President, who must be capable of speaking with sufficient clarity and even nuance to avoid causing international incidents or even accidental wars and things.
But a deeper problem is Mr. Trump's psychological makeup and the suspicion that, as a narcissist, he is incapable of empathy. Certainly, his remark to Mrs. Johnson was not reassuring.
Mr. Trump's supporters, as usual, have tried to defend the indefensible by raising all sorts of irrelevant arguments concerning his intentions and his support for the military and all sorts of other things which have nothing to do with the issue. But now, the Trumpistas have sunk to a new level.
Several conservative news sources are reporting that a Gold Star widow has released a video and transcript of a call with Mr. Trump. The timing and the absence of the clarification the circumstances obviously demand imply that the widow was Mrs. Johnson and that the video proves that Mr. Trump, who denies having made the comment to Mrs. Johnson, is telling the truth.
Perhaps that's inadvertent. Perhaps. Maybe this is not an attempt to pull a fast one. But in fact, the conversation recorded in the video and transcript is, with Mrs. Natasha DeAlencar, the widow of an entirely different soldier who was killed in Afghanistan, not Niger! I just had a Trump supporter I encountered on Facebook cite the video and transcript as a response to my criticism of that Mr. Trump's gaffe. The implication, misleading though it is, seemed obvious: that Rep. Wilson was lying and that Mrs. Johnson was refuting her claim.
Deceit is a weapon extremists of both the Right and the Left wield quite readily. But this is a pretty blatant attempt to deceive people even by the standards of the Alt-Right and its acolytes, and I'm shocked that the Washington Examiner and other reputable sources have allowed themselves to be party what certainly looks like an attempt to deceive the public, even if only by implication.
Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. That would include Mr. Trump if he was capable of shame.
ADDENDUM: The Facebook gentleman says that he wasn't trying to suggest that the conversation with Mrs. DeAlencar was the conversation with Mrs. Johnson, but that he was merely using it as an "example" of how Mr. Trump deals with Gold Star widows. I accept his explanation but pointed out that since his conversation with Mrs. Johnson was the only one I discussed, introducing another conversation is irrelevant to anything I had said. However.....
ADDENDUM II: And now he's becoming abusive, malicious, and even more bizarre and incoherent.
As someone once said, you can't reason someone out of a position he was never reasoned into.
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