In a statement to CNN, Mr. Kelly corroborated reporting from 2020 that he declined to confirm at the time despite pressure from friends and associates to do so.
www.nytimes.com
In a statement to CNN, Mr. Kelly corroborated reporting from 2020 that he declined to confirm at the time despite pressure from friends and associates to do so.
ohn F. Kelly, the onetime chief of staff to former President Donald J. Trump, confirmed on Monday some of Mr. Trump’s most startling comments about service members and veterans, reeling them off in a statement in which he said his onetime boss had “contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.”
“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 P.O.W.s are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them,’”
he told CNN.
John Kelly is a primary source, however there are plenty of sources including others who were simply watching TV. Trump said what he said in interviews.
President Donald Trump said he never called John McCain a loser — he did — and denigrated the record of the late Republican senator on veterans affairs despite routinely appropriating one of McCain’s crowning achievements on that front as his own.
www.pbs.org
AP FACT CHECK: Trump on McCain
President Donald Trump said he never called John McCain a loser — he did — and denigrated the record of the late Republican senator on veterans affairs despite routinely appropriating one of McCain’s crowning achievements on that front as his own.
Trump distorted events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, over the past week and his own hand in them before a furor over his reported comments on fallen soldiers diverted his rhetoric......
TRUMP: “I was never a big fan of John McCain, disagreed with him on many things including ridiculous endless wars and the lack of success he had in dealing with the VA and our great Vets.” — part of a series of tweets Thursday.
THE FACTS: He’s ignoring McCain’s singular successes on behalf of fellow veterans.
McCain was a leading force in the Senate behind the law that gave veterans an option to go outside the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health care system and get private care at public expense under certain conditions. President Barack Obama signed the VA Choice legislation into law. Ignoring that reality, Trump persistently claims that he brought Choice into law when no one else could.
Trump signed a law in 2018 that expanded the options for using the Choice program established by Obama, McCain and other lawmakers.....
TRUMP: “Also, I never called John a loser and swear on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on, that I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES.” — tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: He called McCain a loser.
In addition, The Associated Press has confirmed many of the comments Trump was reported by The Atlantic to have made disparaging fallen or captured U.S. service members, such as his description of the American dead in a military graveyard as “losers.”
As for McCain, Trump told a conservative forum in Iowa in 2015 that his view of McCain changed when McCain lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama. “He lost, so I never liked him as much after that, ‘cause I don’t like losers,” he said. Trump went on to dismiss McCain’s war service: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
Trump in 2015 also tweeted a news article on Twitter calling McCain a “loser.”
This refers to an article in the Atlantic which has a paywall.
Retiring Gen. Mark Milley has a brutal perspective on Donald Trump. The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s claims are very easy to believe.
www.msnbc.com
Goldberg
described an event that was held soon after Milley became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, when he gained an insight into
Donald Trump’s perspective.
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.
As
the report in The Atlantic, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, went on to explain, it had rained that day, softening the ground. As a result, Avila’s wheelchair nearly toppled, at which point Milley’s wife and then-Vice President Mike Pence rushed to his aid.
Soon after, Trump said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” The then-president reportedly told the general that he didn’t want Avila to appear in public again.
In the statement, Kelly is confirming, on the record, a number of details in a
2020 story in The Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, including Trump turning to Kelly on Memorial Day 2017, as they stood among those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, and saying, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?
