We don’t often sympathize with President Donald Trump,
On Monday, a reporter asked him why he’d said little about the deaths of four Army soldiers in Niger. In his rambling response he said, “The traditional way if you look at President Obama and the other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls, a lot of them didn’t make calls … I like to call when it’s appropriate, when I think I’m able to do it. They made the ultimate sacrifice, so generally I would say that I like to call.”
It soon became apparent that his smear against Obama and “the other presidents’’ wasn’t true. A political brushfire got hotter when the mother of one of the soldiers killed in Niger said Trump disrespected her family when he told them the soldier “knew what he signed up for.” Acting as an accelerant, Trump responded with a Twitter spat against a U.S. representative from Florida who had confirmed the mother’s account, which Trump denied, backed up by Chief of Staff John Kelly. He had clumsily been dragged into the mess when Trump brought up Kelly’s son’s combat death in 2010.
The political rancor was not only unseemly, but as often happens in the Trump era, a distraction. Showing real respect for the dead would be to learn what went wrong with a “low risk” operation and to clarify what our objectives are in Niger. We have about 800 troops there and, according to a former CIA analyst quoted in The New York Times, the mission is adrift under the Trump administration. What do we hope to accomplish there? It’s doubtful that anybody signs on for service to their country to die for an undefined purpose.
This controversy brought to mind a pair of messages from presidents during past wars. In World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a letter to the mother of five brothers, the Sullivans, who’d been killed in action while serving together on a Navy ship. An excerpt: “The knowledge that your five gallant sons are missing in action against the enemy inspires me to write you this personal message. I realize full well there is little I can say to assuage your grief. … As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, I want you to know that the entire nation shares in your sorrow. I offer you the condolences and gratitude of our country. We who remain to carry on the fight must maintain spirit, in the knowledge that such sacrifice is not in vain.”
Even more eloquent was the message Abraham Lincoln sent to a mother who lost sons in the Civil War: “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. … I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.’’
These messages came from administrations that recognized that in moments like these the president represents not just himself, but the nation and all it stands for, its people and its ideals. Lincoln’s humility and grace shine like a beacon; whereas the Trump we know is a clanging cymbal. It is telling how language made one American president seem so much larger, and the other entirely the opposite.