Trump veteran comments spark controversy — again

Former President Donald Trump is facing backlash over his comments about veterans. Again.

Trump said Thursday that the country’s top civilian honor was “much better” than its top military honor, because the service members who receive the latter are “in very bad shape” or “dead” — the latest in a yearslong pattern of inflammatory comments the former president has made about veterans as barbs over military service are being traded by both campaigns during a heated election.

Speaking at an event on antisemitism at his Bedminster, New Jersey, estate, Trump was discussing Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire pro-Israel GOP megadonors who set a donation record in 2020 by spending over $170 million. Trump bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson in 2018 for her history of contributions to U.S. national interests and “world peace.”

“That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor,” Trump said Thursday. “But [the] civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they're soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”

Trump has a history of making controversial comments about veterans, receiving backlash for them during both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. But now, both parties’ vice presidential candidates are veterans — and as the GOP attacks the service record of the Democratic vice presidential hopeful, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Trump’s comments Thursday gave Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign ammunition for a counterattack.

“Donald Trump knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself,” Harris campaign senior spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Friday in a statement. “For him to insult Medal of Honor recipients, just as he has previously attacked Gold Star families, mocked prisoners of war, and referred to those who lost their lives in service to our country as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’ should remind all Americans that we owe it to our service members, our country, and our future to make sure Donald Trump is never our nation’s commander in chief again.”

VoteVets, a progressive veterans’ PAC, claimed Friday in a statement that “Donald Trump hates Veterans and their sacrifice, because he looks so small in comparison to them.”

In a statement to POLITICO, senior Trump campaign adviser Brian Hughes said “It’s outrageous that [Harris] and her failing campaign have the audacity to claim concern for service men and women.” He blasted the vice president for “being the last one in the room with Biden as they set in motion our disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.”

In 2015, Trump made headlines when he asserted that the Arizona Republican senator and former presidential candidate John McCain, who spent five and a half years being tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, was “not a war hero” because “I like people who were not captured.” President Joe Biden posthumously granted McCain the Medal of Freedom in 2022.

In 2020, The Atlantic reported that Trump had privately disparaged service members and veterans, calling them “losers” and “suckers,” allegations Trump has denied. Last year, John Kelly, the longest-serving White House chief of staff under Trump, confirmed much of the reporting to CNN.

Also in 2020, Democrats slammed Trump for suggesting Gold Star families could have given him Covid as they discussed with him their fallen family members.

Trump has been partly insulated from attacks on his previous comments this election since his current running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, is a veteran of the Marines. And Vance has gone on the offensive, attacking Walz for the timing of his retirement and accusing him of “stolen valor.”

Walz, who served in the National Guard for 24 years, hit back on Tuesday , saying during a speech, “I am damn proud of my service to the country.”

“To anyone brave enough to put on that uniform for our great country, including my opponent, I just have a few simple words,” he added. “Thank you for your service and sacrifice.”