Corey Lewandowski, former campaign manager of the GOP presidential nominee, Donald Trump, said something completely reprehensible with regard to Capt. Humayun Khan.
Trump has been tangling with Khan’s Gold Star parents all week ever since Khan’s father, Khizr, gave an emotional speech at the Democratic National Convention where he tore into Trump, as his wife, Ghazala, stood silently by his side. Lewandowski piled onto Trump’s idiocy with the following ghastly comment on CNN’s New Day:
If Donald Trump was the president, Captain Khan would be alive today because he never would have engaged in a war that didn’t directly benefit this country. He’s been very clear about that fact and said I don’t support Iraq and I don’t support Afghanistan.
To label this comment as appalling would be a massive understatement. Here are five reasons why.
1. Trump actually supported the Iraq War. In 2002, shock jock Howard Stern flat-out asked Trump if he supported the Iraq War. Trump answered, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
When Lewandowski was told this, he indignantly responded: “He’s been on the record multiple, multiple, multiple times saying he was against the war, unlike Hillary Clinton. If Donald Trump was president, these troops never would have gone… Captain Khan would be alive, as would 7,000 other soldiers.”
In other words, facts don’t matter to Lewandowski; he just had to keep pushing the ghastly talking point.
2. Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, voted for the Iraq War in Congress. And Trump excused him for it. It’s hard to argue that the Iraq War wouldn’t have happened under a President Trump when his own running mate voted for the war.
3. There’s no way to know exactly how things would have turned out if there had been a President Trump in 2002. One of the biggest concerns people have about Trump is that they don’t know how exactly Trump will act in the Oval Office, so it would be even harder to guess how Trump would have acted as president in 2002. Even if a President Trump had been against the Iraq War, who’s to say that he wouldn’t have gotten the country into a different war because some leader may have taken an indirect swipe at Trump? What if Trump had gone full isolationist in his foreign policy like Pat Buchanan right after 9/11, and another enormous terrorist attack had occurred in the homeland?
The point is that it’s simply unknowable to know how things would have turned out for a President Trump, so for Lewandowski to act like he’s certain about what would have occurred is hogwash. Maybe Capt. Khan would still be alive, maybe he wouldn’t be. There’s no way to know for sure. But what truly makes Lewandowski’s comment ghastly is that…
4. Capt. Khan’s parents are clearly still grieving over the loss of their son. Ghazala Khan wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post explaining that her son died from a car bomb in an attempt “to save his soldiers and innocent civilians,” according to Khan, and the agony of losing a loved one never goes away.
“I cannot walk into a room with pictures of Humayun. For all these years, I haven’t been able to clean the closet where his things are — I had to ask my daughter-in-law to do it,” wrote Khan. “Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could? Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?”
When a loved one passes away, there are always moments when you wonder if everything possible had been done to save his or her life, and wonder if only a certain event didn’t occur or somebody had done this differently, would things have been different? It can drive you crazy. Lewandowski claiming that Khan would still be alive only further compounds this agony.
5. There is a more appropriate way to respond to the Khan family. Cindy Sheehan, whose son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, died serving in Iraq in 2004, was a vocal critic of then-President George W. Bush. According Yahoo! Finance, Sheehan “held an anti-war vigil outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, in 2005.”
Here was Bush’s response to Sheehan:
I sympathize with Mrs. Sheehan. She feels strongly about her position, and she has every right in the world to say what she believes. This is America. She has the right to her position. And I thought long and hard about her position — I’ve heard her position from others, which is “get out of Iraq now.” And it would be a mistake for the security of this country and the ability to lay the foundations for peace in the long run if we were to do so.
Agree or disagree, there’s no questioning the honor, integrity, and grace of Bush’s statement. Trump and Lewandowski should take a page from Bush on how to respond to the Khans, but they’re too thin-skinned and hot-headed to show any form of respect towards the Gold Star parents.