Trump denies calling vets ‘suckers.’
WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump confronted a political crisis Friday that could undercut badly needed support in the military community for his reelection campaign as he sought to dispute a report that he privately referred to American soldiers killed in combat as “losers” and “suckers.”
Trump, who has long portrayed himself as a champion of the armed forces and has boasted of rebuilding a military depleted after years of overseas wars, came under intense fire from Democrats and other opponents who said a report in The Atlantic demonstrated his actual contempt for those who serve their country in uniform.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, blasted out a series of statements and organized a conference call for reporters with Khizr Khan, a Gold Star father who has feuded with Trump for years, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, DIll., who was severely wounded while serving in Iraq and who slammed the president during the Democratic National Convention last month as the “coward in chief.”
At a later news conference, Biden said that his son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, “wasn’t a sucker” for serving in Iraq.
“How would you feel if you had a kid in Afghanistan right now?” Biden said. “How would you feel if you lost a son, daughter, husband, wife? How would you feel for real? I probably, I’ve just never been as disappointed in my whole career with a leader that I’ve worked with, president or otherwise.”
In the same vein, VoteVets, a liberal veterans organization that has long been critical of Trump, quickly released an online ad featuring the parents of troops slain in Iraq and Afghanistan, each one declaring that their son or stepson was not a “loser” or “sucker.”
On Thursday evening, Trump heatedly denied making the comments, as reported by the magazine. He repeated his denial Friday. “It’s a fake story, and it’s a disgrace that they’re allowed to do it,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. And he insisted that he respected the troops. “To me, they’re heroes,” he said. “It’s even hard to believe how they could do it. And I say that, the level of bravery, and to me, they’re absolute heroes.”
The president got support from an unlikely source Friday when John Bolton, his former national security adviser who has broken with him and called him unfit for office, said he was on the trip in question and never heard Trump make those remarks. “I didn’t hear that,” Bolton said in an interview. “I’m not saying he didn’t say them later in the day or another time, but I was there for that discussion.”
The report in The Atlantic by its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said that Trump decided against visiting a cemetery for American soldiers killed in World War I during a 2018 visit to France because the rain would have mussed his hair and because he did not believe it was important to honor the war dead.
The article attributed the episode to “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” but did not name them. During a conversation with senior officials that day, according to the magazine, Trump said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” On the same trip, the article said, he referred to American Marines slain in combat at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
The article also said that Trump’s well-known antipathy for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. and a Vietnam War hero, was on display after the senator’s death in August 2018. “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” the article quotes Trump telling his staff. He became furious at seeing flags lowered to half-staff. “What the f--k are we doing that for? Guy was a f--king loser,” the president told aides, according to the article.
The report could be problematic for the president because he is counting on strong support among the military for his reelection bid. He has made his backing for increased military spending, troop pay raises and improved veterans care pillars of his campaign at the same time he boasts of ratcheting down “endless wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But he has also clashed with the military leadership by extending clemency to accused and convicted war criminals, seeking to order active-duty forces into the streets of Washington to crack down on demonstrations and trying to block an effort to change the names of Army bases named for Confederate generals.
Trump has often disparaged the generals who lead the military.