Has President Donald Trump no sense of decency, at long last? Has he left no sense of decency?

Taking to his favorite medium, Twitter, on Monday morning, Trump in so many words accused a gold-star widow of lying about the conversation they had after her husband's death in Niger. So the answer to that enduring question remains: No.

Myeshia Johnson, the wife of the late Sgt. La David Johnson, on Monday morning broke her silence about the now-famous phone call she received from Trump offering condolences. The details of the call had first surfaced with Florida Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson, who is close to the Johnson family and described the conversation after overhearing it on speakerphone; at the time Trump denounced Wilson as a liar, an assertion that his chief of staff, John Kelly, appeared to belie (even as he condemned the lawmaker) in a White House briefing room appearance last week that was a times both powerfully moving and deeply sanctimonious. Sgt. Johnson's mother weighed in on Wilson's side; but until Monday morning the widow herself was the main character in this national drama who had not yet spoken publicly.

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That changed Monday morning when she told ABC's "Good Morning America" that the call from Trump had left her "very upset and hurt; it made me cry even worse." Wilson's account, including that Trump had told the grieving widow that her husband "knew what he signed up for, but it hurts anyways," as Mrs. Wilson recounted it, was "100 percent correct," she said. She added, of the "signed up" comment: "And it made me cry. I was very angry at the tone of his voice, and how he said it."

She also confirmed that Trump appeared to not be able to remember her husband's name, adding that he only remembered it because he told her that he had her husband's report in front of him. "That's when he actually said, La David," she said, adding that Trump stumbled on remembering the name. "That will hurt me the most because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risked his life for our country, why can't you remember his name?" she said. "And that will make me upset and cry even more."

Normal people, people with a sense of either decency or compassion or even sociopaths with enough wits to understand which fights to avoid, would find a way to beat a respectful retreat at this point. Silence would be one option; another would be to issue even a non-apology apology admitting no actual wrong-doing but conceding that of course he never intended for his words to hurt and he's very sorry if they came across the wrong way and so on.

That would be normal people or those who can fake it. Here's how the president of the United States reacted:

I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2017

The widow is wrong and a liar, Trump is saying. Yeah-huh he was respectful; and he did so remember her husband's name.

What's going on? It's a story as old and well-known at this point as Trump's a liar: The president is a self-styled "counter-puncher" who lives by the maxim that no perceived attack can be allowed to pass without overwhelmingly hitting back. This is why he went after another gold-star family last summer during the Democratic convention and why he's comfortable, nay anxious, to call a grieving widow a liar.

The notions of either admitting fault or asking forgiveness are not part of the Trump make-up. Despite claiming to be a religious man (seriously), he is famously "not sure" if he's ever asked God for forgiveness. ("I will be asking for forgiveness," he has subsequently said; no doubt he'll do so right after he produces his tax returns and the unbelievable evidence his investigators found about former President Barack Obama's birth certificate being a fake.)