Trump's Disrespect for Troops, Another Emotional Dead End

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

18 October 17

I felt very, very badly about that. I always feel badly. The toughest calls I have to make are the calls where this happens. Soldiers are killed. It’s a very difficult thing. Now, it gets to a point where, you know, you make four or five of them in one day. It’s a very, very tough day. For me, that’s by far the toughest.

– President Donald Trump talking about himself, October 16, 2017

ffering official, token comfort to the families of fallen American soldiers has been a virtually reflexive ritual since George Washington, and rightly so. The dead are men and women who gave their brief lives for belief in the country, even when their government let them die for a lie or a fraud. The issue is a matter of honoring the sacrifice of the dead, not one of how hard a job that might be for the commander who got them killed. Well, that used to be the issue, but now we have a president who wants us to focus our sympathy on himself, a man who never saw combat, a man who never served in the military, but a man who serves up gobs of public self-pity for how hard it is for him to make a few phone calls. This is Trumplandia.

When a reporter asked him on October 16 why he had not talked publicly about the October 4 ambush in Niger that killed four American soldiers, Trump responded with some of his standard techniques: he didn’t answer the question, he changed the subject, and he lied. Trump lied about President Obama and others, saying they didn’t call, or didn’t call as much as he does, or didn’t call General Kelly. The pushback was immediate (except from General Kelly), with one former Obama aide calling the statement a “fucking lie” and Trump a “deranged animal.” Now the story has legs and continues to grow as reporters motivated by the president’s disrespect go out of their way to tell true stories to impeach the president’s credibility. Turns out Trump has reached out to something like half of the families of the soldiers killed so far on his watch, and some of those interactions have not gone so well.

The four soldiers killed in Niger were all sergeants: La David Johnson, 25, of Miami Gardens, Florida; Bryan C. Black, 35, of Puyallup, Washington; Jeremiah Johnson, 39, of Springboro, Ohio; and Dustin M. Wright, 29, of Lyons, Georgia. As of October 18, Trump had apparently called only one of these four families, with disastrous results.

Trump called the pregnant widow and mother of two, Myeshia Johnson, as she was riding in a car to meet the plane carrying her husband’s flag-draped casket. Unfortunately for the president, his call was on speakerphone and there were witnesses, including her two children, Sgt. Johnson’s mother, and their congresswoman, Frederica S. Wilson. Rep. Wilson later criticized Trump for his insensitivity, never using the sergeant’s name, just calling him “your guy” over and over, and telling Mrs. Johnson, “Well, I guess he knew what he signed up for, but I guess it still hurt."

Trump responded by lying in a tweet, saying Rep. Wilson fabricated the conversation. He also lied saying, “I have proof.” Then Sgt. Johnson’s mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson confirmed that Trump had said that Sgt. Johnson “must have known what he signed up for.” But Trump kept on lying, joined by press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

All this has inflamed the already fevered speculation about Trump’s mental state, awareness of reality, fitness to serve, and of course the helplessness of almost anyone to do anything about it. As one commenter put it, “Trump’s Obama-bashing was so gratuitous — if this was a hockey game he’d get a penalty.”

Others focused on why Trump was silent about the Niger ambush fatalities for twelve days and only sort of addressed them when a reporter asked about them. One suggestion was that Trump thought that Niger was in Puerto Rico and the soldiers were Puerto Ricans. Other in and out of the White House offered a variety of speculations, not always with complete seriousness, that Trump took 12 days to offer any condolences because:

• He thought that was the Islamic mourning period


• They were on a training mission, so how could they get killed?


• Two of the four are Blacks


• They were only sergeants


• They’re not voters anymore


• Acknowledging his betters is anathema


• Four is a lot of calls for 1 guy to make


• He wanted to wait 3 days for each


• Bad staff work


• Ivanka was trying to decide what dresses to send the widows


• He was waiting for a re-supply of paper towels


• That’s not what he signed up for

So far, the White House has yet to offer a credible explanation for the 12-day Presidential Blackout, although there has been some attempt to use “bad staff work,” suggesting that they were slow over at the Pentagon. Some have pointed out in Trump’s defense that this incident is better than when the draft dodger criticized Sen. John McCain for getting captured, but that argument carries the implication that Trump is saying “at least these guys got killed” or some such thing. Not that you’d ever see him meeting a military coffin at Dover Air Force Base

Obviously no one can know what’s in Trump’s mind, perhaps not even the president himself. Until more compelling evidence is available, the best explanation for this episode and all the other White House oddities, high crimes, and misdemeanors is that Trump never really had any idea what he was signing up for.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

All the Other Harvey Weinsteins

By Molly Ringwald, The New Yorker

19 October 17

he tale of Harvey Weinstein is now a thread that has tangled its way through Hollywood, connecting women, mostly actresses, in a depressingly common way. We all seem to have a Harvey story, each one a little different but with essentially the same nauseating pattern and theme. Women were bullied, cajoled, manipulated, and worse, and then punished.

My Harvey story is different, mostly because of timing. I was in one of the first films that Weinstein produced. I accepted a supporting role in a small movie based on “Loser Takes All,” the short novel by Graham Greene. I was twenty years old. The idea of playing a supporting role in a small British movie appealed to me after having just made a big splash in the John Hughes movies. Plus, I was an enormous fan of Greene’s writing. When we began filming, in France, I was warned about the producer, but I had never heard of him and had no reason to fear him. The feeling on the set was that he and his brother Bob were becoming powerful and were difficult to work with, and that it was inadvisable to cross them. During a dinner at the Chèvre d’Or, in a tiny medieval village, there was a tense, awkward moment when Harvey became testy toward our British co-workers and accused them of thinking of us Americans as just the “little guys in the colonies.” It was sort of meant as a joke, I suppose, but it made everyone cringe, and all I could think was that the guy was volatile.

Thankfully, I wasn’t cajoled into a taxi, nor did I have to turn down giving or getting a massage. I was lucky. Or perhaps it was because, at that moment in time, I was the one with more power. “The English Patient,” Weinstein’s first Best Picture winner, was still a few years away. The worst I had to contend with was performing new pages that Harvey had someone else write, which were not in the script; my co-star, Robert Lindsay, and I had signed off to do a film adapted and directed by one person, and then were essentially asked to turn our backs on him and film scenes that were not what we had agreed to. We hadn’t even finished filming, and the movie was already being taken away from the director.

After that, the film was completely taken away, recut, and retitled. Weinstein named it “Strike It Rich,” because he insisted that Americans couldn’t stand to have the word “loser” in a title. He also changed the poster: he had my head stuck onto another body, dressed in a form-fitting, nineteen-fifties-pinup-style dress, with a hand reaching out to accept a diamond, like Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” I wouldn’t have posed for a picture like that, since it had nothing to do with the character I portrayed; it struck me as ridiculous false advertising. (I was always a little mystified that Harvey had a reputation as a great tastemaker when he seemed so noticeably lacking in taste himself. But he did have a knack for hiring people who had it, and I figured that’s what passes for taste in Hollywood.) In any case, the film tanked. I had a percentage of the gross, and, as it turned out, you still make money if you have a gross percentage. I found this out about a year later, when my lawyer called to tell me that I had been denied the percentage owed to me. She asked if it was O.K. if she went after the Weinsteins. I ended up suing them for the money, which I got, and I never worked with Harvey or the company again.

While my own Harvey story may be different, I have had plenty of Harveys of my own over the years, enough to feel a sickening shock of recognition. When I was thirteen, a fifty-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection. When I was fourteen, a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set. At a time when I was trying to figure out what it meant to become a sexually viable young woman, at every turn some older guy tried to help speed up the process. And all this went on despite my having very protective parents who did their best to shield me. I shudder to think of what would have happened had I not had them.

In my twenties, I was blindsided during an audition when I was asked by the director, in a somewhat rhetorical manner, to let the lead actor put a dog collar around my neck. This was not remotely in the pages I had studied; I could not even fathom how it made sense in the story. The actor was a friend of mine, and I looked in his eyes with panic. He looked back at me with an “I’m really sorry” expression on his face as his hands reached out toward my neck. I don’t know if the collar ever made it on me, because that’s the closest I’ve had to an out-of-body experience. I’d like to think that I just walked out, but, more than likely, there’s an old VHS tape, disintegrating in a drawer somewhere, of me trying to remember lines with a dog collar around my neck in front of a young man I once had a crush on. I sobbed in the parking lot and, when I got home and called my agent to tell him what happened, he laughed and said, “Well, I guess that’s one for the memoirs. . . .” I fired him and moved to Paris not long after.

After I moved to Paris, I put my career on the back burner, but I came back to the U.S. occasionally to work. The magazine Movieline decided to feature me on its cover, I guess because anyone who leaves Hollywood after having success seems intriguing on some level. In that article, the head of a major studio—and, incidentally, someone who claims himself to be horrified by the Harvey allegations—was quoted as saying, “I wouldn’t know [Molly Ringwald] if she sat on my face.” I was twenty-four at the time. Maybe he was misquoted. If he ever sent a note of apology, it must have gotten lost in the mail.

I could go on about other instances in which I have felt demeaned or exploited, but I fear it would get very repetitive. Then again, that’s part of the point. I never talked about these things publicly because, as a woman, it has always felt like I may as well have been talking about the weather. Stories like these have never been taken seriously. Women are shamed, told they are uptight, nasty, bitter, can’t take a joke, are too sensitive. And the men? Well, if they’re lucky, they might get elected President.

My hope is that Hollywood makes itself an example and decides to enact real change, change that would allow women of all ages and ethnicities the freedom to tell their stories—to write them and direct them and trust that people care. I hope that young women will one day no longer feel that they have to work twice as hard for less money and recognition, backward and in heels. It’s time. Women have resounded their cri de coeur. Listen.