Biden continued: “When my son volunteered and joined the United States military as the attorney general, and went to Iraq for a year, won the bronze star and other commendations, he wasn’t a sucker. The service men and women he served with, particularly those that did not come home, were not losers”
In the explosive report published Thursday night, Atlantic magazine reported Trump rejected a planned 2018 visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France because he was concerned about what the rain would do to his hair, but also because he didn’t view such an outing as important.
“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Trump reportedly said. Atlantic reported that “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.”
In his remarks on Friday, Biden pointed to disparaging comments the president made publicly in 2015 about former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prominent Trump critic who was a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War. While running in the GOP primary ahead of the 2016 election, Trump rejected the label of “war hero” for McCain, remarking that “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
The Atlantic reported that when McCain died of brain cancer two years ago, the president referred to McCain with expletives and vowed not to support efforts to honor his life.
Trump, as well as other high-ranking White House officials such as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have forcefully denied The Atlantic’s reporting, with Trump calling it a “totally fake story.”
But The Atlantic’s account was subsequently corroborated in part by news outlets including The Associated Press and The Washington Post, which reported other damning allegations about the president’s perception of the nation’s military.
“I’ve just never been as disappointed in my whole career with a leader that I’ve worked with, president or otherwise, that if the article is true, and it appears to be based on the things he said, it is absolutely damnable,” Biden said Friday. “It is a disgrace.”