Trump and condolences

Trump said something insensitive to the widow of a soldier recently killed in Niger. She also said Trump struggled to remember her husband's name. And Trump has been in a name-calling spat with a Congressional Democrat, Frederica S. Wilson, over not just his initial remarks to the widow but also his subsequent efforts to deny that he said what he said. Even White House chief of staff John Kelly has gotten into the fray, backing his boss and belittling Wilson.

This is a big deal to the family, of course, and I can't blame them (including the soldier's mother, who has also weighed in) for being upset.

However, why the hell are the rest of us following this story?

Trump didn't commit gross malfeasance here. He was simply Trump, a man who doesn't feel empathy — who, by the evidence of a lifetime's worth of stories, doesn't even comprehend it on an intellectual level. And be honest: most of us are not good at consoling even those we know well, and the most skilled and empathetic can drop the ball now and then.

So at a human level, however much you may hate Trump, cut him some slack about the call. You might have stuck your foot in your mouth, too, if you were simultaneously contending with the other demands of the presidency.

His subsequent denial and fight-picking with Wilson are a different matter, of course: he was a whiny idiot for getting into it with her, and Kelly lost a lot of his own patina by joining his boss in the pile-on. Whether you think Wilson behaved appropriately by calling Trump out in the first place, Trump and Kelly have made things worse for the White House.

But again, this is business as usual for Trump the troglodyte. It's a classic distraction from his other woes, a distraction that takes advantage of the halo the country has built up around the military since Reagan's days. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders even had the gall to say to a reporter, "If you want to go after General Kelly that's up to you but I think that if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that's something highly inappropriate".

It's important to know that the White House press secretary has the same contempt for the First Amendment and the role of the press in our republic that her boss does. Nevertheless, again, this is something we already knew: any Trump loyalist is going to parrot his undemocratic sentiments and probably shares his authoritarian instincts at some level.

So, whether or not you believe Rachel Maddow's hypothesis (which some might call a conspiracy theory) that Trump picked this fight to distract from diplomatic missteps in Chad and adjoining West African nations, the fact is that the Trump administration's inflaming of the controversy surrounding this condolence call is a deliberate distraction from bigger issues.

Stop rewarding the media for keeping this story alive.

And media, stop falling for the oldest trick in Trump's playbook. Get your heads out of your asses. Tell us what he doesn't want us to know — what we need to know.