Trump made the derogatory comment during an event at his New Jersey golf club — the latest in a documented pattern of insulting service members and veterans.
While addressing the Jews US President Donald Trump said at a rally for supporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey — an event aimed at combating anti-Semitism — that the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom is better than the Medal of Honor because the soldiers being honored are “in very bad shape… or dead.”
The disparaging remark came as the former president praised Miriam Adelson, the billionaire widow of Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Miriam continued to pour millions into the Trump campaign after Sheldon’s death in 2021. The former president awarded Miriam the Medal of Freedom in 2018 for her work as a doctor and her donations to drug treatment centers.
“I watched Sheldon proudly sit in the White House as we awarded Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” Trump said Thursday evening. “It’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor,” Trump added, referring to the highest military award given for bravery in combat.
“But the civilian version, is actually much better because everyone [who] “These soldiers are either in very bad shape because they’ve been shot so many times, or they’re dead,” Trump continued. “She got it, she’s a beautiful, healthy woman, and they’re equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she got it through committees and everything else.”
In 2020, Atlantic Ocean Trump reportedly made particular disparagement of American military service members and veterans during a 2018 trip to France to mark the centennial of the end of World War I, reportedly calling Marines killed at Belleau Wood “suckers” and soldiers buried at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery “losers.”
