By Kos
Daily Kos Staff
Donald Trump’s hatred for veterans is well known, and on Thursday night, he took it even further.
At a Thursday campaign event, which was purportedly meant to focus on antisemitism, Trump said this about GOP megadonor Miriam Adelson and her deceased husband, Sheldon Adelson:
I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom—that’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead. She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman.
Let’s break that down. In Trump’s mind:
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The Presidential Medal of Freedom is “much better” because the Congressional Medal of Honor is given to soldiers.
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The Congressional Medal of Honor is somehow devalued because many of its recipients are “either in very bad shape” from being shot, “or they’re dead.”
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The Presidential Medal of Freedom is better because his recipient is “a healthy, beautiful woman.”
You would think that surviving an assassination attempt would give him some new perspective on being shot at, but … it didn’t.
Of course, this disgraceful statement is only the latest in his long history of despising veterans.
Trump’s hatred for the late Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war, is legendary. According to a 2020 article by The Atlantic:
When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides.
While Trump denied having said that—because of course he did—the statement certainly tracks with his public comments, such as in 2015 when he told an audience, referring to McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
In 2018, during a trip to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the end of the World War I, Trump reportedly refused to visit a cemetery of dead troops, saying, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” And at another point on the same trip, Trump reportedly referred to Marines who died in the World War I battle of Belleau Wood as “suckers.”
After The Atlantic reported these statements, John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff and a retired Marine Corps general, confirmed them to CNN. Incidentally, the Marines fought so heroically at Belleau Wood that the French renamed the woods Bois de la Brigade de Marine, or Wood of the Marine Brigade. Not that Trump gives a damn.
In a 2023 Atlantic story, Gen. Mark Miley, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for about the last year of Trump’s administration, spoke on the record about how horrid Trump was to veterans:
At his welcome ceremony at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, across the Potomac River from the capital, Milley gained an early, and disturbing, insight into Trump’s attitude toward soldiers. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America.” Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. To Milley, and to four-star generals across the Army, Avila and his wife, Claudia, represented the heroism, sacrifice, and dignity of wounded soldiers.It had rained that day, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair threatened to topple over. Milley’s wife, Hollyanne, ran to help Avila, as did Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley.
Avila isn’t just a hero to four-star generals: He’s a hero to everyone. But not to Trump.
"A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them,'" Kelly told CNN. "A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
Despite Trump’s obvious disdain for service members and veterans, so many in the military refuse to see it for themselves—just like how all the major veterans’ organizations have kept silent amid Republican efforts to disparage Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s unimpeachable military record. And if history is any guide, they’ll pretend they didn’t see Trump’s latest insult to veterans.
But how long can those organizations pretend not to notice? And how long can supposed pro-flag, pro-America conservatives tolerate someone who desecrates the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform?
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