Again, the question must be asked of the soulless drones of the Republican Party elite: Is getting rid of the estate tax and shoving more of the nation's wealth upwards really worth putting up with this?

From The Washington Post:

Sgt. La David T. Johnson's mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, told The Washington Post that she was present during the call from the White House on Tuesday to Johnson's widow, Myeshia Johnson. Johnson's mother also stood by an account of the call from Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) that Trump told Johnson's widow that her husband “must have known what he signed up for.” "President Trump did disrespect my son and my daughter and also me and my husband," Jones-Johnson said. Trump lashed back. He denied Wilson's account in a Twitter message Wednesday. He said he had "proof" that the exchange did not go as Wilson had described. Trump did not elaborate, but the claim again raised questions about whether the president tapes calls and conversations.

"Trump lashed back..."

That should be enough to sicken any rational person. The mother of a U.S. soldier killed in action, in a place where most Americans didn't even know there were American soldiers to be killed in action, upbraids the president* for his insensitivity toward her son's widow and the president* feels obligated to "lash back." (This, I would point out, is the president who trotted out the mother of one of the Americans killed in Benghazi to demand that Hillary Rodham Clinton be jailed, and I don't recall HRC's "lashing back" at her.) All he had to do here was shut up and ride out the storm of opprobrium that his initial insensitivity caused. But he couldn't even do that. And I don't believe he has "proof" any further than I can throw Trump Tower.

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I mean, honestly. Mike Pence would sign the same tax plan that is being proposed. He wouldn't stand in the way of the ongoing project to marry the Gilded Age to the age of Jim Crow in a more permanent fashion than was the case in their original manifestation. Why continue to marry yourself and your party to a malignant Macy's Parade balloon and his family of grifters? The same gang of vandals and incompetents will be in the Cabinet. Nothing will change in policy. Pence isn't smart enough to pull that off. But the White House will no longer be a place where war widows get used for political chum to feed an unbalanced ego.

"Trump lashed back..."

Of course, he did. He can't help himself. He lives in his own world in which the rest of us, at best, are props. That was true when he "lashed back" at the Khans last summer. It was true when he inexcusably used the memory of his own chief-of-staff's son as a cudgel on his predecessor. (Come to think of it, how did John Kelly manage to come to work the next day and look himself in the mirror?) Everything in the world that doesn't feed his ravenous narcissism is essentially fit for burning. Christ almighty, what does he have to do?

UPDATE—Oh, come on, Washington Post. You have to be kidding us here:

President Trump, in a personal phone call to a grieving military father, offered him $25,000 and said he would direct his staff to establish an online fundraiser for the family, but neither happened, the father said. Chris Baldridge, the father of Army Cpl. Dillon Baldridge, told The Washington Post that Trump called him at his home in Zebulon, N.C., a few weeks after his 22-year-old son and two fellow soldiers were gunned down by an Afghan police officer in a suspected insider attack June 10. Their phone conversation lasted about 15 minutes, Baldridge said, and centered for a time on the father’s struggle with the manner in which his son was killed. “I said, ‘Me and my wife would rather our son died in trench warfare,’ “ Baldridge said. “I feel like he got murdered over there.”

The whole country's going to have a drinking problem before this is over.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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