Donald Trump decided to double down rather than explain what he meant when he denigrated the military’s highest award for valor in armed service, the Medal of Honor.
Speaking with MSNBC on Saturday, the former president repeated that he believed the honor’s civilian variant, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, is “better.”
“When I say ‘better,’ I would rather in a certain way get it because people that get the Congressional Medal of Honor, which I’ve given to many, are often horribly wounded or dead,” Trump said. “They’re often dead, they get it posthumously.”
“When you get the Congressional Medal of Honor—I always consider that to be the ultimate, but it is a painful thing to get it,” Trump continued. “When you get the Presidential Medal of Freedom, it’s usually for other things, like you’ve achieved great success in sports or you’ve achieved great success someplace else.”
Trump tried to clarify his medal of freedom comments but he just ended up saying the same thing that got people mad in the first place pic.twitter.com/UF6zfvMf8B
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2024
The clarification comes after Trump, who famously avoided the Vietnam War draft with a timely diagnosis of bone spurs, infuriated veterans across the country by claiming that the Presidential Medal of Freedom was “much better” because recipients of the Medal of Honor have been “hit so many times by bullets.”
The off-color comment was made all the worse by the fact that Trump made the remark to elevate one of his top patrons, Miriam Adelson, a heavy-handed Republican donor and the richest Israeli in the world. Adelson and her husband, Las Vegas Sands billionaire Sheldon Adelson, earned Trump’s favor after they funneled $25 million to Trump’s super PACs in 2016 and donated $5 million to his inauguration. That earned them a spot on the dais, just a few rows behind Jared Kushner, as Trump was sworn in. In 2018, their contributions effectively bought Mrs. Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2019 influenced Trump to recognize Israel’s sovereignty in Golan Heights, an Israeli-occupied portion of southwest Syria that the religious state captured in 1967.
Former Trump chief of staff and retired Marine General John Kelly threw out Trump’s comparison of the two honors, telling CNN Monday that the two medals are “not even close. No equivalency of any kind.”
“Think of Normandy, Iwo Jima, Vietnam, or Fallujah,” Kelly told CNN. “The Medal of Honor is earned, not won, by incredibly brave actions on the battlefield under fire typically by very young men who joined when others did not to defend their country.”
“To the service member, the oath is sacred and taken with the understanding that one could be seriously wounded, captured, or killed in living up to the words,” Kelly continued, referring to the oaths of enlistment. “No president, member of Congress, judge, or political appointee—and certainly no recipient of the Presidential Medal—will ever be asked to give life or limb to protect the Constitution. The two awards cannot be compared in any way. Not even close.”
Both comments have drawn comparisons to other disrespectful remarks Trump flung at the military during his time in office, including a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”
