As Gold Star families demand answers, Trump silent on doomed Niger mission

More Gold Star families who lost loved ones in the deadly ISIS ambush that claimed the lives of four U.S. troops in Niger are demanding answers about what went wrong during the chaotic, one-hour long firefight. And while Pentagon leaders are promising answers at the end of ongoing investigations, Donald Trump remains committed to not ever acknowledging the terror attack.

This is the same Trump who over the years tweeted more than 60 times about the Benghazi terror attack in 2012. Yet to date, Trump has not tweeted once about the ISIS ambush.

But the deadly event isn’t going away. Not if Gold Star families can help it.

“Even with adequate resources, a fully manned team and armored vehicles, these brave men would have been lucky to exit this situation with their lives,” Will Wright said in a statement released on Tuesday. He’s the brother of Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright who was killed in Niger on Oct. 4. “Our hope through this tragedy is to discern where, if any, mistakes were made and to fix them going forward.”

On Monday, Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, complained about the lack of information coming from the government about the death of her husband during the ISIS attack. “They won’t tell me anything,” she said on “Good Morning America.” “I don’t know anything.”

To date, Trump has picked a public fight with one of the Gold Star families, as well as the family’s friend and advocate. But he has not discussed the ambush, which became the deadliest day for U.S. combat troops since Trump took office.

Trump has not publicly vowed to find the killers or to bring them to justice. He still has not mentioned the names of the four Army Special Forces troops killed in Niger — other than a single tweet in which he mentioned Sgt. Johnson by name to essentially call his widow a liar. And Trump has refused to mention the “radical Islamic terror” behind the attacks.

Apparently ,for a president obsessed with “winning,” Trump doesn’t want to acknowledge U.S. military failures on his watch, especially failures that come at the hands of ISIS terror fighters.

In short, golf-obsessed Trump continues to display zero interest in the event, even as grieving family members grapple with the countless unknowns surrounding the deadly attack.

During a Monday press briefing at the Pentagon, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the ambush as a “tough firefight” and provided a timeline for the event that’s being investigated. Key questions that remain unanswered are whether the Niger mission changed prior to the ambush, and if the troops had adequate intelligence, equipment, and training.

“We owe you more information; more importantly, we owe the families of the fallen more information, and that’s what the investigation is designed to identify,” Dunford stressed.

In total, ISIS gunmen killed nine men during the attack, four Americans and five Nigerien fighters who were alongside U.S. troops.

Trump, though, remains committed to never discussing the deadly ambush.