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Trump Faces Uproar Over Reported Remarks Disparaging Fallen Soldiers
A report in The Atlantic said the president called troops killed in combat “losers” and “suckers.” He strenuously denied it, but some close to him said it was in keeping with other private comments he has made disparaging soldiers.
By Peter Baker and
WASHINGTON — President Trump confronted a political crisis on Friday that could undercut badly needed support in the military community for his re-election campaign as he sought to dispute a report that he privately referred to American soldiers killed in combat as “losers” and “suckers.”
Mr. 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 Joseph R. Biden Jr., 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 Mr. Trump for years, and Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, 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, Mr. 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?” Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Trump heatedly denied making the comments, as reported by the magazine. He repeated his denial on 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 on Friday when John R. 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 Mr. Trump make those remarks. “I didn’t hear that,” Mr. 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.”
Mr. Trump also sought to smooth over tensions with some in the military by abruptly reversing course on Friday afternoon and announcing that his administration would not be closing Stars and Stripes, the venerable military newspaper, by the end of the month after all. “It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!” he wrote on Twitter.
The report in The Atlantic by its editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said that Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s well-known antipathy for Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona 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 Mr. Trump telling his staff. He became furious at seeing flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking 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 re-election 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.
Mr. Trump has often disparaged the generals who lead the military. During his first presidential campaign, he publicly dismissed the commanders fighting the Islamic State, saying, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do.”
During a meeting at the Pentagon in 2017, he berated top generals. “I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” Mr. Trump told them, according to “A Very Stable Genius” by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”
A new poll by The Military Times taken before the party conventions last month and released this week showed Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump with 41 percent to 37 percent among active-duty troops, a stark departure from the military’s longstanding support for Republicans.
People familiar with Mr. Trump’s private conversations say he has long scorned those who served in Vietnam as being too dumb to have gotten out of it, as he did through a medical diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels. At other times, according to those familiar with the remarks, Mr. Trump would marvel at people choosing military service over making money.
Some said they also recalled him questioning why the United States should be so interested in finding captured soldiers, a comment made in the context of Mr. McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Another former official said Mr. Trump had often expressed discomfort with being around people who had been injured, although he has held events with wounded veterans.
The president was in a rage about The Atlantic’s article on Friday morning, and his advisers were in a panic about how to counter it. They feared it was the beginning of a constant drip of damaging stories from disenchanted former administration officials that could sway voters. While Mr. Trump demanded that allies try to knock down the article, aides recognized that they had few senior military officials who were willing to openly defend the president.
Mr. Trump’s trip to Paris in November 2018 came at a tense moment for him. Republicans had just lost the House in midterm elections when he flew to France to attend a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.
But it was the president’s failure to go through with a planned visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery at the foot of the hill where the Battle of Belleau Wood was fought that drew the most attention. Aides at the time cited the rain in canceling a helicopter flight, but his absence went over badly in Europe and in the United States. Mr. Trump did pay respects to the war dead the next day at the Suresnes American Cemetery outside Paris.
At the time of the visit to France, advisers were blunt in confiding that Mr. Trump was in a foul mood and was quizzing aides about whether he should replace John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general and his White House chief of staff at the time.
Several White House officials at the time said the decision that Mr. Trump would not take Marine One to the Belleau Wood cemetery was made by Zachary Fuentes, a deputy White House chief of staff and close aide to Mr. Kelly, without consulting the president’s military aide. Others argued that a trip by road would have taken too long, at roughly two hours.
Administration officials said at the time that Mr. Fuentes had assured Mr. Trump it was fine to miss the visit. Mr. Kelly traveled to the cemetery himself in the president’s place along with Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Speaking with reporters next to Air Force One on Thursday night after returning from a campaign rally, Mr. Trump insisted that weather, not disrespect, forced the visit to be scrapped. “It was raining about as hard as I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And on top of that, it was very, very foggy. And the helicopter was unable to fly.” To go by ground, he added, a motorcade would have had to wind its way through congested areas of Paris. “The Secret Service told me, ‘You can’t do it,’” he said. “I said, ‘I have to do it. I want to be there.’ They said, ‘You can’t do it.’”
A half-dozen current and former aides to Mr. Trump backed him up with Twitter messages disputing the Atlantic article. “I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion — this never happened,” wrote Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was then the White House press secretary. “This is not even close to being factually accurate,” added Jordan Karem, the president’s personal aide at the time.
The White House also rallied the cabinet to his defense on Friday. “I’ve never heard the president use the language that assertively is said in that article about him calling military suckers and losers,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News. “I’ve never seen that,” Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper released a statement saying that Mr. Trump “has the highest respect and admiration for our nation’s military members, veterans and families.”
Mr. Bolton said he was in the room at the ambassador’s residence when Mr. Trump arrived and Mr. Kelly told him that the helicopter trip had to be canceled. A two-hour motorcade would have put him too far away from Air Force One and the most capable communications array a president needs in case of an emergency, per usual protocol, Mr. Bolton said. “It was a straight weather call,” he said.
While Mr. Bolton said he did not hear the president disparage troops, he added that Mr. Trump did not protest the decision, as he now says he did. “He didn’t say, ‘This is terrible, I have to go out to the veterans,’” Mr. Bolton said. “He accepted it, and that was pretty much the end of it.”
Mr. Bolton added that the reported comments were not out of character for the president. “I haven’t heard anybody yet react to say, ‘That’s not the Donald Trump I know,’” he said.
The reported remarks about Mr. McCain were consistent with Mr. Trump’s publicly expressed view of the senator. In 2015, while seeking the Republican nomination over Mr. McCain’s opposition, Mr. Trump famously mocked the senator’s military service and five and a half years in captivity in Vietnam. “He’s not a war hero,” Mr. Trump said. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Mr. Trump first mocked Mr. McCain for getting captured during an interview in 1999.
Mr. McCain remained a thorn in Mr. Trump’s side after he won the presidency, blocking an effort to overturn President Barack Obama’s health care program, a vote Mr. Trump never forgave and still speaks about with bitterness. When Mr. McCain died, aides said at the time that the president had to be shamed into lowering the flags and he was not invited to the funeral.
In talking with reporters on Thursday night, Mr. Trump insisted that he respected Mr. McCain even though they disagreed.
“I was never a fan. I will admit that openly,” Mr. Trump said. But “we lowered the flags.”
“I had to approve that, nobody else, I had to approve it,” the president added. “When you think — just thinking back, I had to approve either Air Force One or a military plane to go to Arizona to pick up his casket. And I approved it immediately. I had to approve the funeral because he had a first-class, triple-A funeral. It lasted for nine days, by the way. I had to approve it. All of that had to be approved by the president. I approved it without hesitation, without complaint.”
But he falsely denied calling Mr. McCain a “loser.” On Twitter, the president wrote “I never called John a loser.” In fact, at the same 2015 event where he said Mr. McCain was not a war hero, Mr. Trump also scorned him for falling short in his own presidential campaign. “I don’t like losers,” Mr. Trump said. He later reposted a Twitter message calling Mr. McCain a “loser.”
A former senior administration official on Friday disputed Mr. Trump’s assertion that he lowered the flags for Mr. McCain without complaint. Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security at the time, said he got calls from the White House complaining that the department had ordered flags lowered to half-staff. “The president is upset, this has gone out too soon and he doesn’t want it to happen,” he quoted a White House aide telling him.
“I was then asked, ‘Would you guys be able to rescind the directive?’” Mr. Taylor said in an interview. He said he resisted, and ultimately White House aides pushed Mr. Trump to keep the flags lowered. But it was made clear that the president “won’t want them down, and he’s angry.” Mr. Taylor, who recently endorsed Mr. Biden, said that he found the episode “pretty astounding and disgusting.”
Mr. Trump’s animosity with Mr. McCain had its roots in a dispute over a development project in 1996, when the senator opposed a federal loan guarantee that Mr. Trump sought for a West Side project in Manhattan. At the time, Mr. McCain said taxpayers should not “bear the risk of a development for one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the country.”
Peter Baker reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York. Annie Karni contributed reporting from Washington.
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