Soon after taking office, with his deflections about Owens, he shirked it in an important respect. In 2015 he declared of Senator John McCain, a former Navy pilot who had been captured and tortured in Vietnam: “I like people who weren’t captured.” Then there was the incident in 2016 when he went after Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son had died in battle in Iraq, after Khizr criticized him at the Democratic National Convention.Īll of that, however, was before he assumed ultimate responsibility for America’s military. He emphasized that the idea for the mission had originated “before I got here,” with Barack Obama’s administration.Īnd then, with three words, the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States publicly laid responsibility at the feet of his subordinates: “They lost Ryan.”īy that point, Trump had already established a pattern of disrespect for service. “They came to see me and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected,” the president said on Fox after Owens’s death. Not only Owens, but more than a dozen Yemeni civilians were killed, including children. But something went wrong, and the SEALs met a surprise counterattack, NBC reported. It was an operation that, according to a reconstruction by NBC News, Trump green-lit after a dinner with advisers. Owens had been part of a SEAL Team 6 raid to gather intelligence, and possibly snatch a high-value terrorist target. The moment established Trump as a leader who would fall far short of the buck-stops-here burden-shouldering ideal of presidential tradition. William “Ryan” Owens, a 36-year-old father of three, had died in a Special Operations mission in Yemen that Trump personally approved. military suffered the first combat fatality of his administration. Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.ĭonald Trump hadn’t yet served two full weeks in office when the U.S.
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