This is what dictators and tyrants do. They try to change the past to serve their needs.
Last night Trump responded via Twitter to Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece at The Atlantic titled “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’.” Here is a taste of Goldberg’s scathing piece:
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” 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.
And this:
Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral. (These sources, and others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”)
Here is a series of Trump tweets in response:
Does Trump really expect us to believe these tweets? Watch:
At the 1:40 mark he calls McCain a loser and then mocks his military service. NPR covered this here.
And then there is this article titled, “Donald Trump: John McCain Is ‘A Loser’.”
And Donald Trump says it is the people tearing down monuments and indoctrinating kids in public school who are changing history.
Former Trump press secretary Sarah Sanders is defending Trump in the wake of the Goldberg piece:
I think I just will let historian Seth Cotlar handle this one: