Donald Trump Simply Can’t Stop Insulting the Military

On Monday, former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign photographed an event at Arlington National Cemetery, treating the burial grounds as a political venue despite federal laws expressly barring such behavior. 

A “verbal and physical altercation” reportedly took place during a wreath-laying ceremony when Trump’s staffers tried to enter the area of the cemetery reserved for recently deceased service members. 

The incident, which created a firestorm, is part of a broader pattern. Trump has for years demonstrated a flippant attitude toward veterans and a general lack of knowledge about military history. 

Trump drew the ire of veterans groups only two weeks ago, when he said the Presidential Medal of Freedom is better than the Congressional Medal of Honor because the former doesn’t involve sacrifice. The former president and 2024 hopeful quickly doubled down on those comments. 

“[Trump] can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” a retired four-star general told The Atlantic in 2020. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” 

According to The Atlantic, Trump called American soldiers who died in war “losers” and “suckers” in conversations with his senior staff. Trump denies this. In 2018, sources told the outlet, the former president canceled a visit to  the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France because he didn’t want the rain to mess up his hair. 

“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Trump apparently said. During the same visit, Trump asked aides, “Who were the good guys in [World War I]?”

John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, has since confirmed many of the claims in the story, adding that at one point, Trump did not want to be seen with military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for [him].”

Trump had visited Arlington with Kelly in 2017, when Kelly was secretary of the  Department of Homeland Security. Kelly’s son, Robert, was killed in Afghanistan and is buried in Arlington. Standing by his grave, Trump turned to Kelly and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Trump’s insensitivity has sometimes directly affected the families of soldiers. In 2017, the then-president made a widow of a soldier cry when he called her to offer condolences and forgot her husband’s name. He apparently told her that her husband “knew what he had signed up for.”

During his 2016 campaign for president, Trump famously insulted former Sen. John McCain for having been captured during the Vietnam War. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” 

McCain was a prisoner of war at a notoriously abusive prison nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton, starting in 1967. When McCain died, Trump reportedly said: “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral.” 

Kelly said that Trump is “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 POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’” 

Trump even had a spat with retired Adm. William McRaven, who oversaw the killing of Osama bin Laden and the capture of Saddam Hussein. “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that, wouldn’t it have been nice?” he said. At the time, McRaven had just left his university job because he had leukemia.  

During the Vietnam War, Trump avoided the draft due to bone spurs. However, he has claimed that his time at a prep school gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” In the 90s, Trump said that dating while trying to avoid sexually transmitted diseases was his own personal Vietnam — an act of bravery deserving of a Congressional Medal of Honor.

On some level, Trump simply doesn’t understand war. In 2017, according to the Daily Beast, Trump got into what one attendee called a “really fucking weird” argument with Vietnam vets about Agent Orange. Agent Orange is an herbicide used during the Vietnam War that has caused lasting health issues for those exposed to it and their descendants. 

When the topic came up, Trump asked if Agent Orange was “that stuff from that movie.” The veterans told him that Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now portrayed napalm, not Agent Orange. 

“No,” Trump replied, “I think it’s that stuff from that movie.”