I hate that we’re dragging dead soldiers in as gotchas, but Trump started it:

After her Army son died in an armored vehicle rollover in Syria in May, Sheila Murphy says, she got no call or letter from President Donald Trump, even as she waited months for his condolences, wrote to him to say “some days I don’t want to live,” and still heard nothing. […]

The Associated Press found relatives of two soldiers who died overseas during Trump’s presidency who said they never received a call or a letter from him, as well as relatives of a third who did not get a call. And proof is plentiful that Barack Obama and George W. Bush — saddled with far more combat casualties than the roughly two dozen so far under Trump, took painstaking steps to write, call or meet bereaved military families.

Trump has made some calls, to be sure, and has even made them in ways that didn’t leave the families wounded and offended. But there’s no evidence that his policy on contacting grieving military families is dramatically different than those of Bush or Obama—except that Trump alone has tried to gain political mileage out of saying he does it better than anyone else, and Trump alone has a history of publicly feuding with a Gold Star family and being excited to be given a veteran’s Purple Heart because he’d always wanted one and it was “much easier” to be given one than to earn one. And of course, as we know, when it comes to war heroes, Trump “like[s] people who weren’t captured.”