‘We Should All Feel Ashamed’: Donald Trump’s Reaction to Wounded American Soldiers In Video Leaves Critics Dumbfounded
He’s called deceased veterans “losers” and “suckers,” according to his former chief of staff. President Donald Trump is quick to surround himself with the accoutrements of patriotism — American flags, Lee Greenwood, singer of the saccharine ballad “God Bless the U.S.A” — but once requested that wounded soldiers be left out of military parades.
And recently, the president was roundly criticized after he skipped a dignified transfer of four American soldiers killed in a training exercise in favor of a Saudi-sponsored golf tournament at one of his golf courses in Florida.
On Wednesday, Trump met with a group of injured American veterans, fitted with prosthetic limbs, in the Oval Office and once again exhibited his apparent unease around true heroes.
“So you guys got hit, huh? Pretty good,” the president said Wednesday after one of the soldiers informed him they were stationed at a “pretty tough area in the Arghandab River Valley” of Afghanistan. “You got hit. Amazing.”
Many on social media were dumbfounded by Trump’s disjointed response.
“When you’re incapable of empathy you just say dumb sh-t like this and don’t even know it,” wrote one X account holder.
Another noted how the soldiers “lost their legs so that we could elect an authoritarian leader. We should all feel ashamed that Trump is president.”
Asked later about whether he can assure veterans that budget cuts made to the Veterans Administration won’t adversely affect their treatment, Trump discussed his high approval ratings with, presumably, members of the military.
“It’s been better with me than any president in history,” he said. “We had a 92 percent approval rating, which is unheard of, up 50 points from the previous administration, in my first four years, and we’re doing better now.”
He said his administration has “modernized treatment for veterans, “where you don’t have to travel sometimes long distances to get to a clinic or the VA, before returning to his poll numbers.
“The approval ratings are the highest … I’ve never heard numbers like this,” Trump bragged. “It’s better than the first four years.”
“There’s no group of people more important than the people in this room,” he concluded. “They’re going to be taken really well care of. It’s very important to me.”
Trump has disputed claims that he doesn’t hold any respect for the military. But his former chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, confirmed reporting in The Atlantic in 2020 that detailed disparaging comments made during his first term.
“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 said of Trump in a 2023 statement.
“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.”
The Atlantic reported that Trump privately made damning statements against veterans including the late Sen. John McCain, who had been a Vietnam prisoner of war, and former President George H.W. Bush, who was shot down as a Navy pilot in World War II. During his first campaign for president in 2015, Trump declared the Arizona Republican McCain was only considered a war hero “because he was captured.”
“I like people who weren’t captured,” he said.
McCain endured nearly six years of captivity in a Vietnamese POW camp after his airplane was shot down over Hanoi. After the North Vietnamese discovered McCain’s father had just been named commander of all US Pacific forces, the communists offered him an early release, hoping to score a propaganda victory. McCain refused the offer and said he would only accept it if every man captured before him was released as well.
He was subsequently subjected to daily torture by the North Vietnamese that left him with permanent injuries.
Trump avoided military service when a doctor, alleged to have done so as a favor to Trump’s father, diagnosed him with bone spurs, exempting him from the draft at the height of the Vietnam conflict.