I know this is a rhetorical question, but I am going to ask it anyway.

Why doesn’t Donald J. Trump keep his trap shut when he certainly must know the response he is going to evoke?

I know the answer. He cannot. A man with utterly zero sense of self-awareness doesn’t know how to be circumspect.

Example: He told the nation’s governors today that he would have “run into” Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., when the shooting started “even if I didn’t have a weapon.”

Really, Mr. President? You would have done that had you been there?

According to The Hill: “You don’t know until you test it, but I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” Trump told a gathering of governors at the White House. “And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too.”

Does the chicken hawk in chief really expect us to believe the would do something he didn’t have the inclination to do back when there was a full-scale war raging in Southeast Asia?

A much younger Donald Trump came up with student deferments and a medical deferment —  bone spurs, yes? — to avoid service in the Vietnam War. A couple of million others of us didn’t exercise those options. We went to war while individuals such as Donald Trump sat on the sidelines.

This is the kind of thing that the president should be mindful of when he launches into this bit of faux bravery.

Except that Trump has no awareness of how his tough-guy talk plays to those of us who followed a much different path than the one he took when he had the chance to run toward the gunfire.