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Trump, witnesses come out swinging against anonymously sourced story claiming POTUS disparaged US fallen soldiers

September 4, 2020 | | Print Article
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President Donald Trump slammed the “lowlifes” who claimed in an explosive article that he had once called fallen U.S. servicemembers “losers.”

Speaking to reporters on his return from a campaign stop in Pennsylvania late Thursday night, the president lashed out at the “liars” who acted as sources for a report in The Atlantic claiming he had disparaged America’s war dead when he canceled a 2018 trip to a cemetery in France.


(Source: Fox News)

Trump called it a “disgraceful situation for a magazine that is a terrible magazine,” asserting that the claims were “made up” probably by “a couple of people who have been failures in the administration that I got rid of and not fast enough.”

The president told reporters he had not read the piece and was incensed by the accusations, calling it a “disgrace” that the magazine published the claims that he had disparaged American WWI war dead as “suckers” and had complained that the trip would mess up his hair.

“No animal, nobody would say such a thing,” Trump said Thursday night as he arrived at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

Multiple unnamed sources were cited by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic report published Thursday, detailing a presidential trip to France two years ago which was to include a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery northeast of Paris where 2,289 American war dead are buried. An additional 1,060 missing servicemembers have their names inscribed on a memorial wall at the cemetery.

Goldberg’s article made outrageous claims about the cancellation of the president’s visit to the location which, at the time, sparked much criticism.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

 

“I was ready to go to a ceremony, I had two of them,” Trump recalled of the trip, saying the helicopter scheduled to take him to the cemetery could not make the flight due to heavy rain at the time.

“And the Secret Service told me you can’t do it. I said I have to do it. I want to be there,” Trump continued, recalling it would have been a long drive and helicopter ride through busy areas near Paris. “There was no way I would’ve been able to do it and they would have never been able to get the police and everybody else in line to have a president go through a very crowded and congested area.”

“I said I feel terribly. And that was the end of it,” he said, adding that he did go to another memorial ceremony the next day.

“Now somebody makes up this horrible story that I did not want to go. And an even worse story calling certain names to the fallen heroes. It is a disgrace that a magazine is able to write it, and if they really exist, if people really exist that would have said that, they are lowlifes and liars. And I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more,” Trump said.

The president’s claims about the weather and his attempts to make the visit to the cemetery were backed up by documentation that The Atlantic’s “sources” apparently missed.

Naturally, the article set off a new round of unfounded criticism of the president who has repeatedly shown his love and respect for the U.S. Military, past and present. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden took a shot at Trump in a statement on Thursday.

“If the revelations in today’s Atlantic article are true, then they are yet another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States,” the former vice president said.

Besides Trump’s pushback on the claims, the White House quickly slammed the publication and issued a press release including statements from multiple people, some of whom were with Trump on the 2018 trip.

“It’s offensive & patently false. The President holds the military in the highest regard,” White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah said in a statement.

“This never happened,” former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted, calling the Atlantic story “total BS” and saying she is “disgusted by this false attack.”

The Trump campaign and many others also bashed the publication and the so-called anonymous sources who made the false claims.

Here’s a look into how the president actually feels about visiting memorials to our fallen soldiers:

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Frieda Powers
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