Phil Mudd, the former Deputy Director of the CIA’s CounterTerrorist Center as well as the FBI’s National Security Branch, weighed in on Donald Trump’s pathetic attempt to slough off the blame for his indifference to the deaths of four American Green Berets killed in Niger two weeks ago, in which Trump falsely claimed that former Presidents such as Obama and Bush hadn’t bothered to make personal calls to the families of the dead, so why should he?
In doing so, he delivered a blunt assessment of Trump’s ability to understand and sympathize not only with the families of fallen soldiers, but with any Americans who are hurt by his malignant and irrational policies. As a former intelligence official, Mudd drew upon the Trump’s performance shortly after the election when he spoke to members of the intelligence community, using a solemn memorial to those intelligence officers killed in the line of duty as a political backdrop:
“Boy, it’s a tough day for the President? How about for the families who accepted a child or a father or a spouse home in a casket? It’s not a tough day for them? This guy has the empathy of a cockroach. From the day after his inauguration when he showed up at my former agency, the CIA, in front of the wall of fallen heroes, and spoke about the size of his inauguration. Fast-forwarding now nine months, and he can’t figure out his responsibility not only as the Commander-in-Chief, but as the consoler-in-chief.”
After Trump’s statement about former Presidents Obama and Bush was called out as a lie by members of the press, Trump tried to backtrack, not by admitting he made a mistake, not by extending an apology—either to Presidents Obama or Bush—but by blaming his handlers: “that’s what I was told.”
As Mudd said, the empathy of a cockroach.