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Six months after Donald Trump claimed to have lost "hundreds of friends" in the 9/11 attacks, his campaign continues to ignore a request from The Daily Beast that he name even one.
His silence becomes all the more shameful as we come to the 15th anniversary of the day 2,983 innocents were murdered in downtown Manhattan.
"If he has hundreds of friends, he should be able to tell us about them," remarked a Port Authority police officer who has felt a duty to learn as much as he can about as many of the victims as possible. "If he can tell us about the hundreds of friends he lost, who they were, what kind of [people] they were, I might have some respect for him."
The only time anybody can remember Trump being down at the September 11 Memorial and Museum was this April, when he made what seemed more like a campaign stop. Those who escorted him noted that he did not seem to pay particular attention to any of the names around the memorial pools or pictures of the victims displayed in the museum. His own math would say that at least a tenth of these people were his friends.
Trump's then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, reacted as might be expected of anybody who had lost even one friend. A museum staffer later reported that Lewandowski had seemed greatly moved as he paused before a picture of Brian Kinney, who had been a passenger aboard the ill-fated United Airlines Flight 175. Kinney had been one of Lewandowski's best friends and had married a young woman named Alison Hardy whom Lewandowski had dated in high school. Lewandowski and Hardy had subsequently become one of the many post-9/11 romances in which shared loss became love. They are now married.
Trump proceeded past the faces with no manifest interest. He breezed by a haunting photo of a woman standing at the edge of the monstrous charred hole that an airliner had punched in the uptown side of the North Tower. That is the same façade that faced Trump's penthouse apartment four miles uptown.
Along with saying he lost hundreds of friends and...