Fired White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is once again peddling outlandish claims about Donald Trump’s supposed disdain for the military in a last-ditch attempt to thwart the former president’s return as the duly elected commander-in-chief.
Last week, The Atlantic published another hit piece on the Republican presidential nominee strikingly similar to the smear run by the magazine four years ago, which accused then-President Trump of denigrating fallen veterans as “suckers” and “losers.” According to Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who relied entirely on anonymous sources for the election-year hit in 2020, Trump had refused to visit the graves of American World War I soldiers at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, during a 2018 trip to France out of animosity for the dead veterans.
“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Goldberg claimed Trump said.
The anonymously sourced story, however, was immediately debunked by more than a dozen officials who went on record to dispute The Atlantic’s attempted character assassination of a president known for his embrace of the U.S. military. Even his former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who traveled with the president to France in 2018 before becoming one of Trump’s chief antagonists in the media, publicly declared Goldberg’s claims false four years ago.
“The main issue was whether or not weather conditions permitted the president to go out to the Aisne-Marne cemetery,” Bolton explained on Fox News, with inclement weather leading officials to cancel the presidential visit over safety concerns.
While
