Trump Not Only Hadn't Called Families of Fallen Soldiers, He Didn't Even Have a List.

As George Takei might say, oh myyyy. But this is Trump's classic move: Make an absurd claim, try and fail to back it up, do something inexplicably bad, then doubledown trying to explain that. Then double-doubledown by saying he didn't say, didn't do, it's fake news. Boom! A week's worth of news cycles spent trying to undo the damage. Rinse and repeat.

I keep crapping myself. Gotta stop doing that.

I know. There are roughly 36 percent of Americans who like this guy. All of us also know he does a lot of this stuff to divert our attention from the last dumbass thing he said or did. So he keeps saying random things off the top of his head, pulled out of thin air (the thinnest air). His base, so far, has stayed with him. It amazes me, but then 28 percent of George W. Bush's fans never deserted him, and his time in office has been widely, brutally panned. Oh well.

Trump does this kind of horrific nonsense so often it appears to be a strategy he's adopted on purpose, thinking "hey this is working, why stop?" We could give him some reasons.

But this seriously stinks:

In the hours after President Donald Trump said on an Oct. 17 radio broadcast that he had contacted nearly every family that had lost a military servicemember this year, the White House was hustling to learn from the Pentagon the identities and contact information for those families, according to an internal Defense Department email.

It would be comical if it weren't wrapped in tragedy. Of course the kicker is Trump's aides reach out to the Pentagon but pronto to get an up-to-date list of the fallen, which they didn't even have.

The beat goes on.