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Donald Trump made some big claims about his own policy of reaching out to the families of service members killed in action and about his predecessors’ policies on the same. Monday, at a time when he hadn’t yet sent letters to or called the families of four soldiers killed in Niger on October 4, Trump claimed that he calls families, while his predecessors did not. Then on Tuesday he told a grieving widow that her husband “knew what he signed up for.” Trust Trump to find a way to make people wish he hadn’t called the families.
Trump has suggested that he calls the families of all service members killed in action, but that doesn't appear to be true:
After her Army son died in an armored vehicle rollover in Syria in May, Sheila Murphy says, she got no call or letter from President Donald Trump, even as she waited months for his condolences, wrote to him to say “some days I don’t want to live,” and still heard nothing. [...]
The Associated Press found relatives of two soldiers who died overseas during Trump’s presidency who said they never received a call or a letter from him, as well as relatives of a third who did not get a call. And proof is plentiful that Barack Obama and George W. Bush — saddled with far more combat casualties than the roughly two dozen so far under Trump, took painstaking steps to write, call or meet bereaved military families.
And numbers do influence how presidents can and should respond to military deaths; as a former State Department official explained, “If Franklin D. Roosevelt had personally contacted the family members of every service member who fell in World War II, he would have been so overwhelmed emotionally he could not have made any decisions.”
Trump has made some calls, to be sure, and has even made them in ways that didn’t leave the families wounded and offended. But there’s no evidence that his policy on contacting grieving military families is dramatically different than those of Bush or Obama—except that Trump alone has tried to gain political mileage out of saying he does it better than anyone else, and Trump alone has a history of publicly feuding with a Gold Star family and being excited to be given a veteran’s Purple Heart because he’d always wanted one and it was “much easier” to be given one than to earn one. And of course, as we know, when it comes to war heroes, Trump “like[s] people who weren’t captured.”