Shortly before the 2020 election, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a sensational, anonymously-sourced rumor that then-President Donald Trump had referred to soldiers interred at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery as “suckers” and “losers.” In response, 25 people — 14 of whom were with the president in France — went on the record to call the story a hoax and debunk its claims.
One election cycle later, history is repeating itself.
Two weeks before Election Day, with Trump on the upswing and all the “joy” vanished from the Kamala Harris campaign, Goldberg has once again found anonymous sources to accuse Trump of a smorgasbord of outlandish comments, including a negative remark about a murdered Army soldier. And once again, multiple and credible on-the-record denials immediately undermined the story.
Goldberg’s hatchet job begins with a retelling of Trump’s interactions with the family of murdered Army Specialist Vanessa Guillén, interactions which were so respectful and personal that even Goldberg couldn’t make them sound anything but gracious. Then, Goldberg claims — without citing a source — that Trump later angrily refused to pay Guillén’s funeral expenses, saying “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f-cking Mexican.”
As the piece continues, Goldberg (again, without naming his sources) claims Trump wished for “the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Not until paragraph 24 does Goldberg even kind of attribute any accusations to a named source, citing claims in a book written about Trump that allege the president once asked his former Chief of Staff John Kelly,
