Stephanie Fisher got the letter about a week later, delivered by an army casualty assistance officer: the president of the United States wished to express his condolences over the death of her son.
Staff Sgt Thomas Kent Fogarty, a 30-year-old father of two, was killed in Afghanistan in May 2012 by an improvised explosive device.
“I was very comforted. I actually felt like I could have picked up the phone and said ‘look, my son died … and I need to talk to President Obama.’ I kind of feel like I might have been able to get a hold of him,” Fisher said. “I felt like my son got lots of respect.”
TimelineHow the controversy over Trump's condolence call unfolded
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Four US army special forces troops and five soldiers from Niger die in an ambush during a joint patrol in the south-west of the country.
Asked why he has not spoken about the incident, Trump discusses his calls to bereaved families, saying: “If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls – a lot of them didn’t make calls.”
Trump drags White House chief of staff John Kelly into the developing row, saying: “You could ask Gen Kelly, did he get a call from Obama?”, a reference to the death of Kelly's son in Afghanistan.
Trump phones the widow of Sgt La David Johnson and reportedly says Johnson “knew what he was signing up for”, according to Frederica Wilson, a Democratic congresswomen who heard the call.
Wilson criticizes Trump's reported remark as "so insensitive". In response, Trump claims Wilson's account is “totally fabricated” but Johnson's mother supports Wilson's version of events.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Kelly is “disgusted and frustrated” by the politicization of his son's death – even though it was Trump who first mentioned him.
Kelly delivers a rebuke to critics of Trump in an emotional press conference but fails to acknowledge that the controversy began after Trump attacked Obama.
Sanders says it would be “highly inappropriate” to question Kelly, a four-star general, a comment that causes outcry in itself.
On the day of Sgt Johnson’s funeral, Trump refuses to let the matter rest, referring to Wilson as "Wacky Congresswoman Wilson" in a tweet.
Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt Johnson, says Trump's condolence call "made me cry even worse". Trump disputes her account immediately after the interview aires.
Donald Trump painted a contrasting picture of Barack Obama and his predecessors this week. Asked in a news conference on Monday about his silence regarding the four special forces soldiers killed during an ambush in Niger on 4 October, Trump said: “If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls”.
He modified that claim when questioned: “President Obama, I think, probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told.”
Obama’s standard practice appears to have been to write to bereaved relatives of military members and meet with many of them in person, and to make occasional telephone calls that the White House did not publicise.
Regardless of the contact method, Trump’s implication was clear: that Obama disrespected the families of fallen soldiers by a lack of personal effort. Such a claim surfaced in conservative media during his presidency and was also levelled at George W Bush in 2003, though the Washington Times reported five years later that Bush spent considerable time contacting bereaved families.
On Tuesday, Trump told Fox News Radio: “I don’t know what Bush did. I don’t know what Obama did.” But he again took a swipe at his predecessor, suggesting it would be worth asking Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, if he received a call from Obama after Kelly’s son died in Afghanistan in 2010.
As a candidate, Trump was widely condemned for a verbal attack on the parents of Humayun Khan, a soldier who died in Iraq in 2004, after his father, Khizr Khan, gave a speech at last year’s Democratic national convention. Trump insisted that he writes letters and calls the families of military members killed in action.
Several former Obama and Bush aides and supporters reacted angrily to his comments, denouncing them as false, and retired general Martin Dempsey, a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said on Twitter that Obama, Bush “and first ladies cared deeply, worked tirelessly for the serving, the fallen, and their families. Not politics. Sacred Trust.”
Fisher, the bereaved mother, said that Trump’s assertion did not ring true to her. “Obama’s administration seemed to me to be very much engaged with the families,” she said. “Constantly, everything that he gets criticised for, President Trump, he immediately puts it on previous presidents, especially President Obama. He misses no opportunity to deflect.”
Michelle DeFord’s son, Army Sgt David Johnson, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2004, aged 37. She met Obama when she went to Washington to lobby for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that Trump appears intent on undermining.
“I have pictures of Obama giving me a hug when he found out that I was a Gold Star mother,” she said, adding that she was touched by a letter from the former first lady, Michelle Obama, inviting her to contribute to a Christmas tree that paid tribute to deceased armed forces members and their families.
“You had a sense of their appreciation and their acknowledgement of your sacrifice,“ DeFord said. “I kind of think of soldiers as being in the employ of the federal government, so I would think it would be just standard procedure when you lose an employee to send a letter of condolence to the family, that’s the president’s job in my opinion.”
Karen Meredith’s son, 1st Lt Ken Ballard, was killed by small arms fire in Iraq on 30 May 2004 – Memorial Day. “I can assure you that nobody is sitting around waiting for a letter from the president to move on with their grief. The contact comes among numerous letters of condolence that you get from members of the military, members of Congress, members of your community,” she said.
Still, Meredith finds it surprising that the White House seemingly did not promptly send letters to the families of the soldiers killed in Niger. “Especially with General Kelly, the chief of staff, who’s a Gold Star father who would have known that it’s part of your job as the commander-in-chief to console grieving families. I’m just shocked that nobody on the staff took care of it for him,” she said.
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Tuesday evening that Trump had spoken with the families of the four soldiers and “offered condolences on behalf of a grateful nation and assured them their families’ extraordinary sacrifice to the country will never be forgotten.”
Meredith recalled that her letter from the White House arrived within a week or so. No fan of Bush, she said that had he tried to call she probably would have declined to speak with him.
“I almost returned [my letter] without opening it because I didn’t want to hear from Bush,” she said. “When I opened the letter it was very casual and very familiar, as opposed to being a formal letter of condolence. He addressed me as Karen not Ms Meredith and that was not what I expected from the president, I expected it to be more formal … it was ‘Dear Karen, Laura and I are real sorry about this’.”
Meredith met Obama and the former vice-president, Joe Biden, at her son’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery. “He was very sympathetic and empathetic, as was Mrs Obama, and so were the Bidens,” she said. “Trump doesn’t have an empathetic bone in his body and doesn’t understand the importance of hearing from the commander in chief. This is ultimately his responsibility.”