Does Trump have any sense of decency left?
You knew he wouldn’t be able to resist.
When confronted by the parents of a Muslim soldier who died serving his country – which happens to be the United States – Donald Trump engaged in the sort of viciously crass and callous behavior that has become his trademark in the year since he launched his presidential bid.
In his powerful seven-minute speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, Khizr Khan, a lawyer from Charlottesville, Va., memorialized his son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who died protecting his unit from a car bomb in Iraq in 2004, and fired a fierce salvo at the Republican presidential nominee, pointing out that Trump “consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership.”
Khan then asked if Trump had ever read the U.S. Constitution. With his calls to ban Muslims from entering the United States, eviscerate libel laws so he can sue critics, and his praise for Japanese internment camps during World War II, Americans in all walks of life have good reason to wonder.
When asked about it, as he inevitably would be, Trump could have merely praised the valor of Khan’s son, summoned up something resembling sympathy for the loss the Khans have endured, and changed the subject. But Trump being Trump, with his skin as thin as parchment and a worldview centered entirely on his own magnificence, he couldn’t help himself. He mused to George Stephanopoulos on ABC-TV’s “This Week” that, sure, he had made “a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.”
Did it ever occur to Trump that the Khans – or any family of a fallen service member – would trade all of Trump’s alleged wealth and tacky buildings to have their loved ones back? And employing people to run your enterprises is not a “sacrifice.” It’s called “business.”
Of course, Trump also used the occasion to take another dig at Islam, implying that Khan’s wife, Ghazala, stood silently next to her husband at the podium at the Democratic convention because she was being muzzled due to some stricture of Islamic law. The reality, as she pointed out in a column in The Washington Post Monday, is that she is overcome with emotion when talking about her son or even when she sees photographs of him.
In the column, she said Trump is “ignorant” about Islam and he “doesn’t know what the word sacrifice means.”
Instead of just shutting up and attempting some magnanimity, Trump took to Twitter Monday morning, baying about how Khan “viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over TV doing the same – Nice!”
The Khans were not alone in attacking Trump Monday. Many of his fellow Republicans were denouncing him. John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 Republican presidential nominee, starkly criticized Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States and his disparagement of the Khan family. He said, “I cannot emphasize enough how deeply I disagree with Mr. Trump’s statement. I hope Americans understand that the remarks do not represent the views of our Republican Party, its officers or candidates.”
If that is the case, the party should withdraw its support from Trump completely, and let him march toward Election Day on his own.
In 1954, Joseph Welch, the chief counsel for the U.S. Army, famously asked commie-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
How often will we have to ask that of Donald Trump in the next three months?