President Donald Trump during Aisne-Marne American Cemetery visit. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Jeffrey Goldberg that appeared in The Atlantic (9/3/2020). To read the complete article, please click here.
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The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic.
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.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic. He joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and in 2016 was named the magazine’s 15th editor in chief. During his editorship, The Atlantic has set new audience and subscription records, and won its first-ever Pulitzer Prizes. In 2022, The Atlantic received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the top award in the industry. In 2020, Goldberg was named editor of the year by Adweek, which also named The Atlantic magazine of the year.
Although Trump has denied what the article reveals, Goldberg affiirms, “I have multiple sources telling me this is what happened, and so I stand by it,”