Trump says civilian award ‘much better’ than Medal of Honor

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday described the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, as being “much better” than the Medal of Honor, because service members who receive the nation’s highest military honor are often severely wounded or dead.

Trump’s remarks follow a yearslong series of comments in which he has appeared to mock, attack or express disdain for service members who are wounded, captured or killed, even as he portrays himself as the ultimate champion of the armed forces.

At a campaign event at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, billed as a discussion about fighting antisemitism, Trump recounted how he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Miriam Adelson, who attended the event, is among his top donors.

“It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.” Trump said, using a common misnomer for the military award. “She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman.”

Standing in front of six American flags, Trump added that the honors were “rated equal.”

Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign spokesman, said that Trump’s comments referred to “how it can be an emotionally difficult experience to give the Congressional Medal of Honor to veterans who have been wounded or tragically killed defending our country, as he proudly did when he was commander in chief.”

But Trump’s remarks drew swift criticism from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans, who argued that he has exhibited a pattern of disrespect toward military service members that has made him unfit for command.

“Donald Trump knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself,” a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, Sarafina Chitika, said, adding that his comments “should remind all Americans that we owe it to our service members, our country, and our future to make sure Donald Trump is never our nation’s commander in chief again.”

Trump’s remarks also threatened to undermine efforts by his Republican allies to attack Democratic vice-presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota over his military record. Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who spent four years in the Marine Corps, has criticized Walz for leaving the Army National Guard to avoid being deployed to Iraq and for exaggerating his service record to claim falsely that he had served in combat.

Walz, who retired from the National Guard in 2005 after 24 years, has defended his record, framing his decision to leave the military to run for Congress as a “call of a duty.” When he retired, soldiers knew a deployment to Iraq was possible but the actual orders came months after his retirement.

The Harris campaign has said Walz misspoke when he gave the impression at a political event in 2018 that he had served in combat.

Vance on Friday defended Trump, telling reporters at a campaign event in Milwaukee that the former president was a “guy who loves our veterans and who honors our veterans.” Though he acknowledged he had not heard Trump’s full remarks, Vance characterized them as compliments for Adelson that were not “in any way denigrating those who received military honors.”

Trump, who never served in the military, has faced bipartisan blowback over his posture toward service members and veterans throughout his political career. While campaigning for president in 2016, he disparaged the record of Sen. John McCain, a former naval aviator who was held prisoner for more than five years during the Vietnam War.

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said then, adding, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Republicans, many then wary of Trump, immediately rushed to McCain’s defense.

Trump also during that campaign fought with the family of Humayun Khan, a slain Muslim-American soldier, after Khan’s father spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and railed against Trump for smearing the character of Muslims. Trump argued the family had “no right” to criticize him, and the squabble led top Republicans to voice their solidarity with Khan’s family.

During his 2020 campaign, Trump was forced to defend his support for American troops after The Atlantic reported that he privately called American soldiers killed in combat as “losers” and “suckers,” setting off a political firestorm.

Democrats highlighted the reported comments as evidence of his contempt for those who serve, and left-leaning veterans groups condemned him.

Trump has vigorously denied he made those remarks. But John F. Kelly, a retired four-star general who was once Trump’s White House chief of staff, confirmed the former president’s comments disparaging veterans. And at the time, people familiar with Trump’s private conversations said that he has long expressed scorn for those who served in Vietnam as not being smart enough to have gotten out of it, as he did through a medical diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels.

In a statement to CNN last year, Kelly cast Trump as “a person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

Kelly’s statement came days after Trump suggested in a social media post that Mark Milley, his former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for treason over calls he made to Chinese officials to reassure them of the nation’s stability after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump’s supporters.

Trump’s comments about military troops and veterans became an issue earlier this year during the Republican primary, after he insinuated that the husband of one of his rivals, Nikki Haley, accepted a deployment to Africa with the National Guard to escape her. The Haley campaign attacked Trump’s “anti-veteran record” and distributed an open letter from dozens of veterans that condemned his statements.

Trump met with Adelson on Thursday to reconcile with her after he insulted her over text messages sent by an aide at the end of July. When he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to her in 2018, the White House cited her work supporting “Jewish schools, Holocaust memorial organizations, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and Birthright Israel, among other causes.”

The Presidential Medal of Freedom, established by President John F. Kennedy, is intended to honor people who have “made an especially meritorious contribution” to national security, world peace or “cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” A president may unilaterally bestow the award.

The Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest commendation for valor in combat, is awarded to a soldier who exhibited “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity” that went “beyond the call of duty” and involved “risk of life,” according to the Department of Defense. Being wounded or killed is not a requirement for receiving the medal, which is awarded only after approvals throughout the military chain of command.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.