Immediately upon being notified two weeks ago that four US service members were killed in remote but uranium-rich Niger, Donald Trump yelled at his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, “Where the hell is Niger?” Associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones was there to hear the exchange.
“I’ve heard about Nigeria,” Trump said, “which has radical Islamic terrorists in the north. Those Boko Haram bastards are probably related to Barack Obama."
“And I want all Nigeria’s oil so I can continue to fly to my Tower, my golf clubs around the world, and all my resorts.”
Then Melania, who, as a European, speaks French, among other languages, interrupted their conversation — for which she was roundly reprimanded by Trump — to explain, “Niger, c’est un état au nord de Nigeria. Niger a attendu son indépendence de France le trois aout, mille neuf cent soixante. Je ne sais rien au sujet de pourquoi quatre soldats courageux américains on été tué la-bas dans une embuscade mené par ISIS. Ca ne peux pas finir bien.”
After Trump screamed and yelled at Melania to speak English, Kushner, Trump’s primary aide-de camp, told his father-in-law that Niger, a landlocked former French colony, has experienced turmoil in recent years between the Saharan north and the rest of the country.
Sergeant La David Johnson, an African American, was among the four US soldiers killed in the October 4 ambush in Niger. Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (D-Florida) was in a car with Sgt. Johnson’s widow when Trump called her and told her that her husband “knew what he signed up for, but I guess it still hurts.”
Trump denied that he said that, but others in the car corroborated Congresswoman Wilson’s description of the conversation.
Moments later, Trump tweeted that Congresswoman Wilson, an African American who has represented a Congressional District in South Florida since 2011, will be defeated by an acolyte of his close personal friend Steve Bannon in November of next year for challenging Trump’s denial.
Trump has never served the America that he is rapidly making worse again in our military, but his father, real estate tycoon Fred Trump, sent him at age thirteen to a private military school in New York to straighten him out. During the Vietnam War, he received a medical deferment attributed to heel spurs.
Trump is very upset that one of his many Republican nemeses in the Senate, war hero John McCain, the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has raised questions about the previously undisclosed presence of the US military in Niger.