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After baselessly accusing President Barack Obama of failing to call the families of fallen soldiers earlier this week, on Tuesday, President Donald Trump himself called the families of the soldiers who were killed in Niger earlier in October.

However, it appears Trump’s comments to one widow did not bring comfort and instead made her cry, according to an account from Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL).

Wilson was in a car with Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. La David T. Johnson, on Tuesday afternoon when Trump called and spoke to Johnson on speakerphone. The congresswoman told the Washington Post that Trump told Johnson, “He knew what was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyway.”

“He made her cry,” Wilson told the Washington Post, describing Johnson’s reaction to Trump’s phone call.

Johnson was on the way to the airport to meet her husband’s remains, according to Miami television station WPLG.

US President Donald Trump says a claim that he made insensitive remarks to the recently bereaved widow of a soldier is "totally fabricated".
Congresswoman Frederica Wilson said he had told the widow of Sgt La David Johnson: "He knew what he was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyway."
The Democratic lawmaker said she was shocked by the alleged comments.
Sgt Johnson was among four US special service soldiers killed in Niger by Islamist militants this month.
Mr Trump had already been criticised for not contacting the families of the dead servicemen right after the fatal ambush on 4 October.
In US politics, nothing is off-limits any more.
After (inaccurately) swiping at his predecessors for not calling the family members of US soldiers killed in combat, Mr Trump is on the defensive over allegations he mishandled a call with a grieving widow.
The accuser is a partisan Democratic congresswoman and the president, not surprisingly, is pushing back hard. This controversy is spiralling towards the gutter.
Mr Trump made this bed, however. He was quick to cite the slain son of chief of staff John Kelly to justify his contention that Barack Obama didn't always make phone calls. Then there were the disparaging comments candidate Mr Trump made last summer about the parents of a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq.
The more this story drags on - and it will drag on - the more damage it could do to a president who wraps himself in the symbols of patriotism and the military, but is in danger of being viewed by the public as lacking empathy when it counts most.
An important presidential role is consoler-in-chief during times of tragedy. Successful politicians learn early that they need a human touch.
It's a job Mr Trump, the anti-politician, has little experience doing - and it shows.
The president tweeted on Wednesday morning: "Democrat Congresswoman totally fabricated what I said to the wife of a soldier who died in action (and I have proof). Sad!"
Mr Trump has yet to provide any evidence.
A White House official said Mr Trump's conversations with the families of dead servicemen were private.
Ms Wilson, who represents a Florida district, told CNN the president's call had been made shortly before Sgt Johnson's coffin arrived in Miami.
"This gentleman has a brain disorder," said the lawmaker, "and he needs to be checked out."
Ms Wilson told WPLG, a Miami TV station, she had heard the president's "so insensitive" remarks to the widow on speakerphone in a limousine.
"Yeah, he [President Trump] said that," Ms Wilson said. "To me, that is something that you can say in a conversation, but you shouldn't say that to a grieving widow.
"And everyone knows when you go to war, you could possibly not come back alive. But you don't remind a grieving widow of that."
Ms Wilson told the Washington Post the widow, Myeshia Johnson, who is expecting the couple's third child, had broken down in tears after the conversation.
"He made her cry," Ms Wilson said.
The congresswoman told the newspaper that she had wanted to grab the phone and "curse him out".
But an army sergeant who was holding the handset would not let her speak to the president, she said.
The full context of the conversation is not known. Ms Wilson said that when she had asked Ms Johnson about the exchange, she said she could not remember.
The congresswoman later responded to Mr Trump's denial by tweeting: "I stand my account of the call with @realDonaldTrump and was not the only one who heard and was dismayed by his insensitive remarks."
Mr Trump has been on the defensive over the deaths in Niger since a reporter asked him at the White House on Monday why he had still not called the families.
He provoked fury by falsely claiming that his predecessor, Barack Obama, and other former US presidents had not called the relatives of dead service members.
Mr Trump also said he had written letters to the families of the four killed in Niger and planned to call them soon.
The White House later said the president had spoken to the families but it did not say when.
On Tuesday, Mr Trump ratcheted up the row by suggesting that President Obama had not called the family of Mr Trump's chief of staff, Gen John Kelly, when his son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010.
The Associated Press says that like presidents before him, Mr Trump has made personal contact with some families of dead soldiers - but not all.
"What's different is that Trump, alone among them, has picked a political fight over who's done better to honour the war dead and their families," the news agency reports.
"He placed himself at the top of this pantheon, boasting Tuesday that 'I think I've called every family of someone who's died' while past presidents didn't place such calls."
This is not the first time Mr Trump has found himself in an imbroglio over US veterans.
As presidential candidate, he mocked Senator John McCain for having been captured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
He also engaged in a racially charged feud with the parents of decorated army captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Democrats in Congress remain locked in resistance and denial, despite a growing and increasingly evident need for coordinated legislative activity.

They remain in the grip of their delusions that the election was stolen from them by some fanciful collusion with Russia, despite the increasingly evident fact that that the investigations of it have so far yielded zero factual basis for it

Despite all of this, our economy is thriving in a way we haven't seen in a long while. Optimism appears to be growing

Both are increasingly resonating, both with the general public, and even the Congress. He is setting the public agenda and has changed the direction of public debate in a way that promises continued action and success.

It is amazing that a conservative would complain about obstruction, after eight years of relentless Republican obstruction. That is truly a pot and kettle situation. Besides, if it is alleged to be bad when Democrats do it, then it was bad when Republicans did it.

What, are we running a day care center here?

Federal court rules World War I memorial cross must be torn down

Washington (CNN) — As the Senate gets ready to make a major move on tax reform, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont will participate in a CNN town hall debate Wednesday night to discuss efforts to overhaul the tax code.

CNN's Jake Tapper, anchor and chief Washington correspondent, and CNN's Dana Bash, chief political correspondent, will moderate the debate, which takes place in Washington at 9 p.m. ET

According to the tax reform "framework" that Republicans released last month, the plan would lower the corporate rate to 20%, reduce the number of income tax brackets from seven to three, double the standard deduction, increase the child tax credit and repeal the estate tax.

Many key details are still missing and Republicans have yet to release the full bill, waiting on the Senate to first pass a budget resolution. House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady suggested last week that the legislative process in the House would begin soon after the budget was passed.

So far Republicans have agreed to a tax cut that would cost $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. While Trump officials and Republican leaders argue that economic growth will pay for the cuts, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, has been adamant that he won't vote for any tax reform bill that will add to the deficit.

However, they have worked with the GOP to coordinate on legislation: the current Obamacare fix bill, negotiated between Patty Murray and Lamar Alexander, is a great example of this.

there's been some encouraging movement on banning devices designed to turn semi-autos into effectively auto-firing weapons.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

However, they have worked with the GOP to coordinate on legislation: the current Obamacare fix bill, negotiated between Patty Murray and Lamar Alexander, is a great example of this.

While I'm encouraged to hear that there is bipartisan movement on fixing the problem, from what I've heard on the news last night I'm not sure that the current proposal is much of a solution. The fix seems to center around letting people buy catastrophic plans if they can't afford the skyrocketing premiums of a regular plan.

That's no fix. If people get a catastrophic plan because they can't afford a regular plan, as soon as they get sick the deductible will ruin them.

What we really need to do is undo all the sabotaging of Obamacare that the Republicans have carried out in recent years.

Rather than belabor false equivalence, I want to focus on the category error that makes this particular kind of false equivalence possible, because if it goes uncorrected, it will clear the path by which illiberal forces in America ultimately prevail. It isn’t that Sean Hannity and scores of other oily Trump apparatchiks aren’t daily engaged in brazen hypocrisy. They are. It’s that the concept of hypocrisy doesn’t really capture the conservative media’s driving ethic, in all its ugliness. Lumping the methods of Trump apologists into the same critical framework as “classic politics” creates a parity between agitprop and honest discourse that propagandists will exploit until most people can’t tell the difference. It will allow insidious disinformation to chew away at the institutions of journalism and academic expertise, until the enlightened foundations of an informed citizenry collapse.

...The most influential figures in conservative media today cannot be shamed out of hypocrisy, because they are, at best, completely indifferent to those notions. In some cases, they’re outright hostile to them. When the assumption of deep-seated good faith doesn’t hold, the value of scrutinizing hypocrisy plummets.

Hannity and Tucker Carlson may be dull-witted, but they are surely self-aware enough to understand that they use their platforms on Fox News for purely instrumental ends. Trump’s enablers have taken an interest in the stomach-churning revelations about Harvey Weinstein not because they’re committed foes of workplace sexual misconduct or gender inequality, but because they want to neutralize one of Trump’s biggest liabilities (that he is an admitted sex offender) and undermine the credibility of the mainstream media in the process.

And the latter is the ultimate prize.

Given Perkins’s own history, it’s hardly surprising that he would align himself with the likes of Gorka and Bannon, with their ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. If anything, Perkins knows his own base. In 1996, Perkins ran the U.S. Senate campaign of Louisiana Republican Woody Jenkins, for which he purchased the phone-bank lists used by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in Duke’s gubernatorial campaign. David Duke was the first Klan leader to work in concert with neo-Nazi groups, as reported by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons in their book, Right-Wing Populism in America.

In 2001, during his tenure as a Louisiana state legislator, Perkins addressed the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens.

Author Charlie Sykes was best-known as a top Wisconsin conservative talk show host who frequently interviewed fellow cheeseheads and GOP favorites Paul Ryan and Reince Preibus. But when candidate Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, Sykes became a vocal member of #NeverTrump, warning his listeners about this “dangerous” candidate.

His newest book is called How the Right Lost Its Mind. On the "Powerhouse Politics" podcast, he explained how conservatives have strayed from their core values. He points a finger at the Trump campaign’s chief strategist Steve Bannon and what he describes as “revenge of crazy town.”

“Steve Bannon is so much a part of this Trump story. Here’s a guy who flirted with the alt-right. Don’t pass this point -- he was in the White House. He had the ear of the President of the United States. Here’s basically one of the gods of dysfunction and he was sitting in the White House.”

Now that Bannon has left the White House and returned to the right-wing Breitbart News website, Sykes says the “worst people in the world” are becoming the faces of the GOP.

The mother of a US soldier who was killed in action has backed a congresswoman's claim that President Donald Trump showed insensitivity during a phone call to her son's widow.
Representative Frederica Wilson said he had told Myeshia Johnson: "He knew what he was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyway."
Mr Trump said Ms Wilson's account was "totally fabricated".
Sgt La David Johnson was killed in Niger by Islamist militants this month.
He was one of four US special forces soldiers who died in an ambush.
Mr Trump had already been criticised for not contacting the families of the dead servicemen right after the fatal ambush on 4 October.
Sgt Johnson's mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, backed Representative Wilson's account of the phone call.
"President Trump did disrespect my son and my daughter and also me and my husband," she told the Washington Post newspaper.
A separate case which saw Mr Trump offer money to the grieving father of a dead serviceman in a call, but allegedly not pay up, has now emerged.
"He said: 'I'm going to write you a cheque out of my personal account for $25,000', and I was just floored," the father told the Washington Post.
The White House subsequently told the newspaper that the cheque had been sent, saying it was a "generous and sincere gesture".

The NFL will not force its players to stand during the national anthem despite backlash over recent protests, the league's commissioner says.
Roger Goodell said he would "encourage" players to stand, but would not punish them if they refused to do so.
The NFL chief said he was "not looking to get into politics" and wished instead to keep the focus on football.
President Donald Trump has criticised NFL stars kneeling in protest against perceived racial injustice.
"We believe everyone should stand for the national anthem," Mr Goodell told reporters on Wednesday after a second day of meetings with team owners and player representatives in New York.
"That's an important part of our policy."
The commissioner continued: "We want our players to stand, we're going to continue to encourage them to stand."
He added: "Our players will state to you publicly they are not doing this in any way to be disrespectful to the flag, but they also understand how it's being interpreted, and that's why we're trying to deal with those underlying issues."
Mr Trump later tweeted: "Too much talk, not enough action. Stand for the National Anthem."
Hours earlier, he took to Twitter to accuse the league of "total disrespect" for not punishing players who kneel.
Mr Trump has previously insisted that players who failed to stand should be fired or suspended.
Mr Goodell said about half a dozen players are still protesting and the league would work "to get that to zero".
He said on Wednesday he had not spoken to Mr Trump since the controversy erupted.
Some sports leagues, including the NBA basketball league, suspend players if they do not stand during the anthem.
Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, 29, started the protest last year when he sat down as the Star-Spangled Banner was played during a pre-season game in 2016.
He explained his gesture, which later became known as "taking the knee", was meant to highlight police brutality against African Americans.
He has been without a team since he opted out of his contract with the 49ers in March.
On Sunday it was announced he has filed a grievance against team owners he believes are conspiring not to hire him because of his protests.

As Jonathan Chait demonstrated in his 2007 book The Big Con, “supply-siders have taken the germ of a decent point—that marginal tax rates matter—and stretched it, beyond all plausibility, into a monocausal explanation of the world.” The supply-siders “think booms and busts result from changes in tax policy—and only from changes in tax policy.”