The Widow Maker

     Donald Trump is a worthless piece of shit.
     There is no need to gussy up that sentiment with wit, panache or any other literary embellishment. Because what we need in this country is plain, unvarnished truth and sentiment. And, ironically, the guy who's most credited and lauded for speaking without a filter is... Donald Trump.
     Because what's there to say about a Commander in Chief who insults a widow of his own making by callously saying her dead, mutilated husband "knew what he'd signed up for"? That he never once mentioned Sgt. La David Johnson by name because he couldn't be bothered to commit to memory the same number of names as the men who were killed in Benghazi?
     And, if that was Trump's only faux pas regarding Myeshia Johnson, it would be bad enough. You would think a widow, especially a new war widow with two small children and pregnant with her late husband's third, would be among the most pitiable and sacred people on the planet earth.
     But this is Donald fucking Trump we're talking about here, a "man" (for want of a better word) who's been afflicted with moral polio since his life began on June 14th, 1946. A guy who, like Dick Cheney, dodged the draft five times on account of bone spurs and played shiny tin solider in prep school to buff out his physical and moral cowardice. So, of course he made it worse.
     Myeshia Johnson, grief-stricken as she was, originally tried to give Trump an easy way out by saying only of the now-infamous call that Trump's gesture was a "nice" one. Of course, this was at exactly the same moment her Congresswoman, Rep. Frederica Wilson, lambasted Trump over the tone and content of the call. It was initially from her, a doctor in Education and a third term United States Representative, that we'd heard this. So naturally, when the truth came out, Trump had to double down on the lie and call the widow a liar when she confirmed her Congresswoman's account.
     Yes, Donald Trump became the first Commander in Chief to publicly call a war widow a liar. Then send out not one but two flacks in the persons of his Chief of Staff John Kelly and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, two senior administration officials. The only wonder is that Trump showed enough restraint to not call Mrs. Johnson names from his shit-stained blue perch on Twitter.
     And while people are rightly saying that we should not pay attention to this as much as we should pay attention to the "Benghazi on steroids" that was the Niger massacre, we should not forget it entirely. He caused the widow that he'd created great pain at a time in her life when she needed it the least, as if anyone ever needs pain. He's launched a shameless attack on the Congresswoman who'd first given us the account, claiming through a fleshy curtain of more flacks that the "president's" call to Mrs. Johnson was "sacred" and that no one should've repeated what Trump's been denying he had said (even though it was certainly within the Johnson family's purview to allow the Congresswoman, a friend of the family for decades, to listen to the entire call on speakerphone.).
     It got even worse when Sarah Huckabee Sanders took to her podium after retired General John Kelly had stood behind the same one and essentially called the pregnant widow a liar again. And Sanders, who always looks as if she'd just found a vibrator in her daughter's underwear drawer, waggled her pudgy finger and said we should not question the honesty of four star generals.
     There was a reason why it took Trump so long to even acknowledge that there was an attack on our forces in Niger. That's because the intelligence community fucked up. The Department of Defense fucked up. Trump fucked up. Then his administration fucked up. It was the worst miscarriage of power this nation had ever seen since the murders of Pat Tillman and that of another Johnson, LaVena Johnson.
     It's all of a piece- The intelligence failure that told those 12 Green Berets they were unlikely to encounter any resistance even as they drove in unarmored pickup trucks into an ISIS stronghold, then had to wait a half hour, without air support, for the French to arrive so they could just gawk at the enemy because for reasons that have not been explained to us, were told to stand down and not fire a single bullet at the enemy. It took another half hour for an evac chopper to arrive, this one owned by a private corporation that didn't do head counts and left Sgt. Johnson behind and alone, for reasons that have also not been made known to us, while he was still alive (because his radio beacon, which was tied to his vitals, was still on). Then it took 48 more hours to reclaim his mutilated corpse, for reasons that also have not been explained to us.
     For a week, both the DoD, the Trump administration and their GOP enablers in Congress acted as if it never happened. Many Americans, including those of us who pride ourselves on having a good idea what's going on, wondered why we were in Niger and since when. The military loves you as long as you come back alive and reasonably well. They'll want to make a recruiting poster out of you as they wanted to do with former Cardinals safety and Army Ranger Pat Tillman until they say No.
     Until the Jessica Lynch's say, "That's not what happened."
     Then all bets are off. It's the same old, same old once they've outlived their usefulness.
     But this is a new low even for government officials, even Republicans. A war widow was called a liar when a guy who sent more special forces into a meat grinder of a country in which we seemingly do not belong with bad equipment, bad intelligence and careless war profiteers decided once again to punch down at a fresh widow who'd just buried her husband two days before.
     Because Donald Trump does not care about the lives of anyone who cannot do him and his family some good in the political and corporate arenas. And, if this KKK administration has shown so many times just since last summer, it is that it especially does not tolerate mouthy African American women who call bullshit on it. Jemele Hill, fresh off an inexplicable suspension at ESPN, can tell you all about that. Congresswoman Wilson can tell you all about that. And Myeshia Johnson can tell you all about that.
     Trump is like that dowager in that old children's book who fucks up a cup of tea and solicits advice on how to remedy it from all sorts of idiots who suggest salt, pepper, more sugar, which only made the tea more horrible because the dowager could not envision the possibility of simply starting over and making a fresh cup and doing it right. At the end of that book, she had finally learned that lesson.
     Trump never will because he's the world's oldest seven year-old.