Trump’s America (cont’d)

October 23, 2017
By Joe Kloc

US president Donald Trump, who once said that “disabled veterans” were “clogging and seriously downgrading” Fifth Avenue and that veterans selling goods on the “most important and prestigious shopping street” would make the “image” of New York City “suffer” if the “deplorable situation” wasn’t stopped, called the widow of La David Johnson, a Green Beret killed in action in Niger, and reportedly told her that her husband “knew what he signed up for” but that it “hurts anyway”; Trump tweeted that he had “proof” that Florida congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who had recounted the details of the call, had “totally fabricated” his words, but did not specify what his proof was; Trump’s chief of staff defended the president by holding a press conference in which he said that journalists should watch a “very, very good” movie about a soldier he served with who was killed in action, that it was “not the case anymore” that women were “looked upon with great honor,” and that Wilson was an “empty barrel” who had lied about obtaining $20 million in funding from the federal government for an FBI building in her district; a video surfaced showing that Wilson, who was not serving in Congress at the time the money was granted, had not lied about securing the funding but had been involved in naming the building after two slain agents of the FBI, an agency that Trump accused of paying for opposition research against him; Johnson’s widow told journalists that Wilson’s account of her call with Trump was “one hundred percent correct” and that what “hurt me most” about the conversation was that Trump initially couldn’t remember her husband’s name, which she said made her “very, very upset”; and Trump tweeted that he had not forgotten Johnson’s name. “I had a very respectful conversation” tweeted Trump, who has said that he likes soldiers that “weren’t captured,” that the mother of a US soldier killed in action did not speak about her son’s death because she was a Muslim, that a captured US soldier returned to the country after five years in a Taliban prison should be executed, that “strong” veterans don’t get PTSD, that although the US military buys Viagra for male soldiers it should not pay for the medical treatment of transgender service members, that he couldn’t recall which of his feet had the bone spur that allowed him to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War for the fifth time, and that his “personal Vietnam” was having sex with women in the 1990s without contracting a sexually transmitted disease.