Samael — 4 weeks ago(March 05, 2026 12:47 AM)

Trump caused a huge stir during the 2016 primary campaign when he said of John McCain, who spent years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam: “He’s a ‘war hero’ because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
In 2017, a Democratic congresswoman accused Trump of telling a Gold Star widow that her deceased husband “knew what he was signing up for.” (Trump denied the account, but the widow confirmed it, and the White House seemed to tacitly confirm it as well.)
Multiple media outlets and Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly said that Trump in 2020 disparaged dead and injured soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” and declined a visit to honor the dead at Aisne-Marne Cemetery in France. Kelly said Trump didn’t want to stand next to amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.” Trump denied those comments.
Trump has repeatedly in recent years downplayed the traumatic brain injuries that more than 100 soldiers suffered from a 2020 Iranian missile strike on a US base in Iraq, calling them “headaches.” That earned him a rebuke from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which called on Trump to apologize.
The VFW also criticized Trump in 2024 for saying the civilian Medal of Freedom was “much better” than the military Medal of Honor because the latter’s recipients are often “in very bad shape.”
In March 2025, Trump seemed unfamiliar with the cases of four US soldiers who had gone missing during a training exercise in Lithuania. Asked whether he’d been briefed on the situation, Trump paused and said: “No, I haven’t.” The soldiers were later found dead.
Just two months ago, Trump caused a bit of an international incident by claiming that troops from NATO allies “stayed a little back” from the front lines in Afghanistan. Many NATO allies suffered high numbers of combat deaths and casualties while joining the US-led war on terror.
“How this vile, disgusting, and immoral behavior has become normalized… is something our descendants will study.”