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The Veterans of Foreign Wars has long positioned itself as a nonpartisan organization that has nothing to do with electoral politics. Plenty of groups run campaign ads, issue endorsements, and create super PACs, but the VFW isn’t one of them.
With this in mind, it becomes all the more notable when the organization publicly criticizes a presidential candidate in an election year.
In 2020, for example, an Iranian missile strike left several dozen U.S. troops with traumatic brain injuries. Trump dismissed the importance of the injuries — he called them little more than “headaches” — prompting the Veterans of Foreign Wars to ask him to apologize for minimizing what had happened to the troops. Trump ignored the request.
Four years later, the GOP candidate insulted veterans again, prompting another VFW response. The New York Times reported:
The Veterans of Foreign Wars, a nonpartisan veterans organization, issued a statement condemning Donald Trump’s comments that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a civilian award, was “much better” than the Medal of Honor because service members who receive the nation’s highest military honor are often severely wounded or dead. Criticizing the remarks as “asinine” and crass, the organization’s head, Al Lipphardt, said the remarks made him question whether Trump had the “seriousness and discernment” necessary to serve as commander in chief.
If you missed it, it was late last week when Trump spoke at an event on antisemitism at his Bedminster golf club and was introduced by Miriam Adelson, who plays a prominent role in GOP politics. As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, the former president, unprompted, reflected on the fact that he gave Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, as part of an apparent gesture to thank the late GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson.
“That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version,” Trump said, referring to the Medal of Honor military award.
“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 added. “She gets it and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. And they’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she got it for — and that’s through committees and everything else.”
These unscripted and wildly unnecessary comments are what prompted the angry response from the VFW, among many others.
For his part, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley responded to the controversy by telling NewsNation’s Chris Stirewalt, “Well, look, there is nobody who supports the military, our veterans’ communities, and all of the military families more than President Trump.”
I won’t pretend to know whether the RNC chair genuinely believes what he said, but the fact of the matter is that pretty much everyone supports the military, our veterans’ communities, and all of the military families more than Trump.
We are, after all, talking about a Republican who has disparaged wounded veterans, condemned fallen American heroes as “suckers” and “losers,” disparaged American servicemen and women who are captured during combat, feuded with Gold Star families, and downplayed the importance of troops with traumatic brain injuries.
What’s more, as a candidate, Trump liked to say he “felt” like he had served in the military because his parents sent him to a military-themed boarding school as a teenager. He went so far as to boast that his expensive prep school gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military,” which was a precursor to Trump pointing to bone spurs as part of an apparent effort to dodge the draft.
In other words, it’s not as if this guy has a reservoir of credibility on veterans’ issues he can rely on after his latest nonsensical comments.