What did Donald Trump do today?

He put words in the mouths of American soldiers he got killed.

Today, the Defense Department announced the names of another killed in the ongoing war in Iran. The body of Sgt. Angel Rampersad of Queens, New York, was brought back to American soil at Dover AFB, along with the remains of two other soldiers killed in an Iranian attack on an Army post in Jordan.

 

Asked about the deaths today en route to the transfer ceremony, Trump put words in the mouths of the dead soldiers, claiming that "they said, and—all of them said, very strongly, 'we can't let—cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.'"

Trump, of course, never spoke to any of them while they were alive, and if he'd spoken with their families—a responsibility he's tried to avoid in the past—the White House hasn't mentioned it. He himself didn't settle on the nuclear justification for quite some time after the war began. Instead, Trump seems to have been pressured or manipulated by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who wanted open war with Iran for his own domestic political reasons. 

Trump has outright lied about what dead servicemembers and their families have said in the past. He's also publicly picked fights with grieving family members who don't let him control the narrative. In 2017, after he'd ordered an ill-advised raid in Niger that saw four American soldiers killed, he lectured a widow on how her husband would have felt about his sacrifice, and then attacked her in the press when she told reporters what he'd said.

Trump, who dodged the draft in Vietnam by getting a tenant of his father's to write him a fake medical excuse, has often expressed contempt for people who died in military service. He once asked his former chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, "What was in it for them?" and referred dead servicemembers as "suckers" and "losers." (Kelly's own son was killed in Afghanistan.) At an earlier transfer ceremony, he took the opportunity to wear a campaign baseball cap, which he did not take off in the presence of the bodies.

The American death toll in the war now stands at 18.

Why does this matter?

• Even by Trump's standards, this is a disgusting kind of lie to tell.