“No, I heard that they had headaches, and a couple of other things, but I would say, and I can report, it’s not very serious,” Trump said dismissively. When pressed about the potential for traumatic brain injury among those concussed, Trump added: “They told me about it numerous days later, you’d have to ask Department of Defense. I don’t consider it very serious relative to other injuries that I’ve seen. I’ve seen what Iran has done with their roadside bombs to our troops. I’ve seen people with no legs and with no arms. I’ve seen people that were horribly, horribly injured in that area, that war. No, I do not consider that to be bad injuries, no.”
Which, well, yeah.
Let’s start with what we know about the injured soldiers. We know that the 11 soldiers initially injured were evacuated from the base in Iraq — eight to Germany and three more to Kuwait. In addition, the Pentagon announced Tuesday that an unspecified number of other troops had been injured in the attack and evacuated to Germany.
So, let’s see here: A President who never served in the military dismisses the injuries of US service members as minor despite there being no medical professionals — in or out of the service — saying that. This will, of course, be regarded by Trump’s base as the media nitpicking him — he said they had headaches, after all! — but that doesn’t change what Trump said in Switzerland on Wednesday. Which is, just to reiterate: Soldiers injured in a missile attack, which was retaliation for Trump’s killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani earlier this month, were no big deal.
Trump’s downplaying of the injuries is in service of himself, of course. In the immediate aftermath of the Iran attacks, Trump said this in an address to the nation: “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime. We suffered no casualties. All of our soldiers are safe and only minimal damage was sustained at our military bases.”
Now that the available evidence contradicts that claim, Trump is looking for a way out — without admitting he and his defense officials may have underplayed the effects of the Iranian attack. And so, he dismisses injuries to American soldiers suffered in the attacks as “headaches” and certainly nothing like their fellow servicemen who have had limbs blown off.
This isn’t and shouldn’t be OK. If a Democratic president did this exact thing, Republicans would — rightly — be up in arms. That they aren’t, because Trump said it, tells you everything you need to know about how much the GOP has capitulated to the President.
Source : Nbcnewyork