Trump Has a Real Problem With Wounded Vets

Trump walks to embrace Army captain Luis Avila in 2019. Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

While Donald Trump loves to portray himself as a patriot who deeply loves the United States military, his appalling disrespect for service members has actually been a running theme throughout his political career.

The latest example comes from a profile of General Mark Milley, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the final 16 months of Trump’s presidency. Jeffrey Goldberg reports in The Atlantic that Milley came to feel Trump’s attitude toward service members was “superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.” Milley’s misgivings started during his first day on the job in 2019 when Trump reportedly told him “no one wants to see” wounded soldiers after he met Luis Avila, a severely injured Army captain:

At his welcome ceremony at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, across the Potomac River from the capital, Milley gained an early, and disturbing, insight into Trump’s attitude toward soldiers. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America.” Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. To Milley, and to four-star generals across the Army, Avila and his wife, Claudia, represented the heroism, sacrifice, and dignity of wounded soldiers.

It had rained that day, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair threatened to topple over. Milley’s wife, Holly­anne, ran to help Avila, as did Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley. (Recently, Milley invited Avila to sing at his retirement ceremony.)

Video from the event only captured Trump warmly greeting Avila and his wife, hugging them, and applauding:

Milley is now known for publicly disparaging Trump. He reportedly drafted a resignation letter after police tear-gassed protesters in Lafayette Square to clear the way for a Trump photo op and kept making Hitler references to aides as Trump tried to stay in power after the 2020 election. Trump has not responded well to all this: On September 22, he described Milley on Truth Social as a “woke train wreck.” Trump also referred to Milley’s standard communications with China in 2020 vowing to inform them of any attacks. “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” he wrote.

Milley’s claim is highly plausible as it lines up with previous comments Trump is alleged to have made openly expressing his discomfort with wounded veterans. Susan Glasser and Peter Baker have reported that when Trump — inspired by a Bastille Day celebration he attended in 2017 — became obsessed with staging the biggest-ever military parade in Washington, D.C., he specifically told then–White House chief of staff John Kelly that he didn’t want “wounded guys” to be a part of it. From a New Yorker article drawn from Glasser and Baker’s book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021:

“Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. “This doesn’t look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle.

Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are — and they are buried over in Arlington” …

“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

The Atlantic has also previously reported that during a 2018 planning meeting for a military parade, the then-president “asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. ‘Nobody wants to see that,’ he said.”

Trump has repeatedly disparaged service members who do not match his warped standards in other ways. He kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign by getting into a fight with John McCain, saying of the late senator and Vietnam prisoner of war, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Toward the end of his campaign, he publicly sparred with Khizr Khan, the father of Captain Humayun Khan, a U.S. Army captain killed in the Iraq War.

Once in office, reports of Trump disrespecting wounded and captured service members continued. He skipped the traditional visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery when he visited Paris in 2018 because allegedly he did not see the point of honoring Americans who died in World War I. Two years later, The Atlantic reported that Trump had asked senior staff members, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” and referred to the 1,800 marines who died in the Battle of Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Presumably, Trump views himself as a “winner” for avoiding war altogether by being diagnosed with bone spurs in his heels.