Is There A Racial Pattern To Who Gets A Call From The President? - Josh Marshall

By JOSH MARSHALL Published OCTOBER 19, 2017 2:53 PM

This is an uncomfortable topic. But when I came into the office this morning, CNN was interviewing the parents of Army Specialist Etienne Murphy about their son. It was a shattering interview. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder whether it isn’t exploitative for networks to put these families on camera at all. It seemed important to Etienne’s mother to read a statement she’d written about her experience. And if you’re going to do such interviews, the CNN host handled the interview with great sympathy and tact. The Murphys, like other families, had never received a call or any contact from the President. But it also occurred to me: a lot of the relatives who received calls seem to be white and a number of ones who didn’t or had bad experiences seem to be black.

Now, this was based not on any systematic look at the families involved. It was just an impressionistic sense I got from being immersed in the news over the last 48 to 72 hours. So I tried to look a bit more closely, looking up details about all the military fatalities I could find, the race of the deceased and what I could find if anything about contact from President Trump. There are too many things we don’t know and too small a sample size to say anything definitive. But that pattern does appear to hold up based on the publicly available information.

The Washington Post reports that at least 20 Americans have been killed in action since the President took office in January. In their article from yesterday they reported they’d been able to make contact with 13 families and “about” half received calls and half did not. I went to icasualties.org and counted 22 deaths in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters. (The latter includes deaths in Yemen and Syria, where Etienne Murphy died.) The iCasualty number doesn’t include any of the fatalities in Niger. And the counts are complicated by the fact that some count only hostile fire deaths versus accidents of one sort or another in war zones. Regardless, it’s probably fair to say between 20 and 25 military fatalities that might normally be contacted in some fashion by the President since Trump took office.

Neither of these counts includes the 10 sailors killed on the USS John S McCain following a collision on Aug. 21 or the seven sailors killed in the separate collision of the USS Fitzgerald on June 17. The mother of John Henry Hoagland III, who died in the McCain accident, said she received a letter from the President but no call.

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