President denies he said fallen troops were ‘suckers’ and ‘losers’

PRESSURE was growing last night on military officials who revealed remarks allegedly made by Donald Trump that fallen American troops were “losers” to serve, after the president angrily denied the reports.

The Atlantic magazine relayed accounts of a number of unnamed starred generals and anonymous Marine Corps officers, which appear to show Mr Trump denigrating soldiers.

According to one account, widely thought to have been given by former chief of staff John Kelly, Mr Trump was said to have visited the Arlington Cemetery gravesite of Mr Kelly’s son, Robert, who was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, on Memorial Day 2017, and said to Mr Kelly: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Mr Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, stepped down in 2018.

The Atlantic also reported that Mr Trump refused to visit the Aisne-marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 because he regarded the dead First World War soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” for getting killed, citing four senior staffers. The White House said at the time, and restated yesterday, that his no-show was due to bad weather.

Mr Trump was alleged, too, to have said he did not support the 2018 state funeral of John Mccain, the Republican senator and decorated Navy veteran who spent years as a Vietnam prisoner of war. The magazine claimed Mr Trump was angered that flags were flown at half-mast for Mr Mccain, saying: “What the f--- are we doing that for? Guy was a f-----g loser.” Mr Trump speculated the claims had been made by “a couple of people that have been failures in the administration that I got rid of ”. He tweeted on Thursday night that the reports were “fake news”.

The Atlantic’s reporting was confirmed by the Associated Press and The Washington Post, which said Mr Trump also asked not to include wounded and disfigured veterans in a military parade because “nobody wants to see that”.