Where Are Trumps Tweets About Fallen Soldiers?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/where-are-trumps-tweets-about-fallen-soldiers
COMMANDER IN SILENCE
Where Are Trump’s Tweets About Fallen Soldiers?

No tweets, no speeches, nothing for 22 of the 23 servicemembers who died fighting the wars he promised to easily win. Instead, the president creates a new crisis every day.
Justin Glawe
08.18.17 1:00 AM ET



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A.J. was 22 years old and 22nd American to die in Iraq and Afghanistan so far this year. He died alongside his friend, Roshain Brooks, 30, of Brooklyn, New York. All but one of those dead soldiers have not been mentioned publicly by President Trump; he addressed the widow of Navy SEAL Ryan Owens at the State of the Union address. (Owens’s father was so upset about the apparently ill-conceived raid that took his son's life that he refused to meet the president when the soldier's body arrived at Dover Air Force Base.)

As for A.J., Brooks and the other soldiers who have died this year, Trump has said nothing on Twitter, the platform that he claims allows him to get “the truth” to the American people without the filter of the “Fake News.” If anyone can get around the media’s obsession with everything Trump tweets, it’s the president himself. A few messages on the platform reminding people that men like A.J. continue to die in a war that most of us don’t pay much attention to could go a long way. It would also show that the president is thinking about something other than the media’s coverage of him, and whatever fire he set that day in Washington.

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Now, the father offers prayers to the remaining soldiers in his son’s unit. He wonders what their future holds in a war that sometimes seems nearly forgotten—even by the president.

Trump hasn’t said much about Iraq or Afghanistan lately. For the latter country, the president resorted to his preferred practice as a leader when he allegedly said the U.S. commander in Afghanistan should be fired during a tense July meeting with top national security officials. (Trump compared the situation there—a 16-year war that has cost 3,539 American lives—to the renovations of a New York City restaurant in the 1980s.)

When it comes to Iraq, Trump has been tweeting his opinion about the American presence there since 2011. During the presidential campaign, Trump lied that he had been against the 2003 invasion and regularly decried what a “disaster” the American war effort there was. But he never said what he would do as president—other than claiming he would “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. The last time Trump mentioned Iraq on Twitter was July 31, 2016, when he thumbed out a complaint against Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim American soldier slain during a suicide attack in Baghdad in 2004. Trump had been “viciously attacked” by the Gold Star father, he said.

A.J. was under attack on Sunday, somewhere in a country that Trump has never visited, fighting an enemy the president has promised to destroy. Mind you, Trump wouldn’t come up with such a plan himself—despite saying on the campaign trail that he knows “more on ISIS than the generals do.” Instead he has left the future of soldiers like A.J. to those same generals he said weren’t as smart as him. And it turns out that Trump’s plan looks much like Obama’s before him—perhaps not a comforting thought for fathers wanting to prevent other families from the pain Stigler is experiencing.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/where-are-trumps-tweets-about-fallen-soldiers