Donald Trump was chastised Friday for saying that the highest civilian award he presented to a donor was superior to the highest US military medal because his supporter was “healthy and beautiful,” whereas troops are usually killed or shot before being honored.
At a campaign gathering with Jewish supporters in New Jersey late Thursday, Trump turned to Miriam Adelson and told her that he had awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his tenure in the White House.
He said that Adelson, a big campaign contributor and the wife of the late Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, had gotten an award “better” than the more recognized Medal of Honor, which is only awarded to military soldiers for acts of exceptional courage.
Trump described the civilian version as “the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor,” despite the fact that the military award is not referred to as “congressional.”
“It’s actually much better because everyone who gets the Congressional Medal, they’re soldiers,” said the congressman. “They’re either in very bad shape, because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
Adelson, in comparison, “gets it and is a healthy beautiful woman.”
A representative for Democrat Kamala Harris, who is running against Trump in the November election, stated that the Republican “knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself.”
Dean Phillips, a Democratic representative, said on X that his father died in combat and labeled Trump a “repulsive, ignorant, megalomaniac.”
And VoteVets, which supports Democratic veterans running for government, claimed Trump “doesn’t respect veterans and their sacrifice.”
Florent Groberg, a former soldier who received the Medal of Honor in 2015 for protecting members of his patrol in Afghanistan from suicide attackers, said he had “tremendous” admiration for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The presidential medal, however, is “not quite comparable to the Medal of Honor, as they are two very different awards with different criteria and significance,” he wrote on X.
On the campaign road, Trump routinely trumpets his military backing, as he did while president. However, he has a history of making harsh remarks about soldiers who have been killed, wounded, or captured.
In 2020, The Atlantic reported that Trump declined to attend a US military cemetery during a presidential trip to France because it was “filled with losers.”
And his former chief of staff, John Kelly, stated last year that President Trump did not want to be photographed among military amputees “because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.'”
While running for president in 2015, he mocked the then-Republican senator John McCain, who was tortured and imprisoned for over six years during the Vietnam War, saying he preferred “people that weren’t captured.”
J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, addressed the incident during a campaign appearance, saying, “This is a guy that loves our veterans.”
Trump wasn’t “denigrating” veterans, but rather “saying some nice things about a person he liked.”