Cue the eye rolls. The Atlantic magazine, a thoroughgoing far left Trump hater, has come up with a story saying that on a visit to Europe the President had called dead American World War I soldiers “losers.” It also says the President canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris because it was raining and it would ruin his hair.
And, of course, the sources for this were anonymous.
No less than disaffected ex-Trump National Security aide John Bolton stepped up to say that it never happened. “I was there” and “I didn’t hear that,” Bolton told The New York Times. He added that had such a remark been made he would have put the story in his tell-all anti-Trump book.
Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was indignant. She tweeted:
The Atlantic story on @realDonaldTrump is total BS. I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion – this never happened. I have sat in the room when our President called family members after their sons were killed in action and it was heart-wrenching…
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) September 4, 2020
It is amusing to watch the liberal media celebrate this story from anonymous sources when named sources who were there deny the event ever occurred.
But since the media is so concerned that our leaders respect the military, perhaps they will go back in time and recall this story from the dawn of the Bill Clinton presidency in April of 1993. Here’s the story as reported by the Baltimore Sun:
“VANCOUVER British Columbia — In a subtle but calculated attempt to patch up his rocky relations with the U.S. military establishment, President Clinton went running yesterday morning with an Army general who’d been insulted while at the White House.
The officer, Lt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, is the most decorated man in the U.S. armed services. He was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Service Cross twice for valorous service in separate tours in Vietnam and was the officer who directed the victorious U.S. ground forces in Kuwait during the Persian Gulf war.
General McCaffrey, special assistant to Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was visiting the White House on business shortly after Mr. Clinton was inaugurated when he said good day to a woman he presumed to be a Clinton aide. He said she responded: “I don’t speak to people in uniform.”
….The story had such resonance because it confirmed the worst fears of military families: “that the president, who avoided military service, and his administration were actively hostile to the military.”
And then there was this from then-Senator John Kerry in 2006, two years after his defeat by President George W. Bush. He was talking up the merits of getting a good education and explained why:
“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
This is to say, in the style of the elitist he is, Kerry was saying that the military was home to those who were uneducated and the not-very- smart. A rather stunning thing to say considering how much Kerry made of his own military service in Vietnam.
The hard fact here is that what the media is doing here is projection – portraying their own contempt for the US military and trying to cast it on Trump. And they go out of their way to ignore a story like this one from The Hill in February of this year.
Trump travels to Dover to receive remains of service members killed in Afghanistan
The story said:
“President Trump on Monday traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware where he participated in a ceremony honoring the return of the remains of two U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan.
Trump arrived in Dover just before 10 p.m. local time after a rally in Manchester, N.H., then disembarked and took part in a dignified transfer ceremony for the remains of Sgt. 1st Class Antonio Rodriguez of New Mexico and Sgt. 1st Class Javier Gutierrez of Texas.
The two men were killed in an apparent insider attack in Afghanistan last week that also wounded six others. The attack was not thought to be the work of the Taliban, according to news reports, despite regular conflicts between Taliban forces and Afghan security forces.
National security adviser Robert O’Brien told reporters aboard Air Force One after the event that the ceremony was one of the “toughest” parts of the president’s job.”
Then there are multiple stories across the last four years like this one from Reuters, a mere four months after his 2017 inauguration.
Trump visits wounded U.S. service members at a military hospital
The story begins:
“BETHESDA, Md. (Reuters) – President Donald Trump visited wounded U.S. service members at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Saturday, his first visit as president to the armed forces hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington.
Accompanied by his wife, Melania, Trump awarded Army Sergeant First Class Alvaro Barrientos the Purple Heart, the medal given to members of the U.S. military wounded or killed in battle.
Barrientos was injured in Afghanistan on March 17 when an Afghan soldier opened fire inside a base in Helmand province, wounding three U.S. soldiers. Barrientos’s right leg was amputated, according to a White House official.”
All of this is to say that time after time after time President Trump has shown his utmost respect and love for both the U.S. military as a whole and the individual members he has met along the way during his repeated visits to Walter Reed. Not to mention the respect showed returning soldiers whose bodies he has greeted on the return from their last mission.
And The Atlantic? Recall that a while back Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the magazine hired – then quickly fired – conservative writer Kevin Williamson. A Never Trumper, Williamson’s sin was a tweet opposing abortion. The twitter mob came for him. When he cited the fact that the late Christopher Hitchens had differing views on some issues with liberals, the reply from Goldberg was: “Yes. But Hitchens was in the family. You are not.”
Donald Trump is decidedly not in the far-left magazine’s family. And they hate him for it.
Let’s cut to the chase. The liberal media hates the President. There is no untruth big enough to not be used to smear the President in the last two months of the election.
This is exactly why The Atlantic “family” wrote this decidedly false story. And has no memory of the Clinton and Kerry episodes.
Imagine that.
