Pete Buttigieg, the US transport secretary and a military veteran, has criticized Donald Trump after a report that he sought to bar a severely wounded veteran from public appearances during his presidency.
In an interview with the Atlantic, Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said Trump had been irritated after Luis Avila – who lost a leg and suffered brain damage after an IED attack in Afghanistan – sang at Milley’s 2019 welcome ceremony.
“Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded,” Milley said Trump told him after the ceremony.
Milley told the Atlantic that Trump said Avila should never appear in public again.
On Sunday, Buttigieg – who was a lieutenant in the US navy reserve and served a tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2014 – told CNN that Trump’s alleged order was “just the latest in a pattern of outrageous attacks [by Trump] on people who keep this country safe”.
Military members wounded in combat, Buttigieg said, “deserve respect and a hell of a lot more than that from every American, and definitely from every American president”.
Buttigieg also said: “The idea that an American president, the person to whom service members look as a commander in chief, the person who sets the tone for this entire country, could think that way or act that way or talk that way about anyone in uniform, and certainly about those who put their bodies on the line and sacrificed in ways that most Americans will never understand … I guess wounded veterans make president Trump feel uncomfortable.”
Trump has previously attacked members of the military. In 2020, the Atlantic reported that Trump had said the Aisne-Marne American cemetery – where more than 2,000 American military members who died in France are buried – was “filled with suckers”.
The Atlantic reported that Trump had also said the more than 1,800 marines who died at Belleau Wood, the site of a key battle in the first world war, were “suckers” for getting killed.
Trump denied the report, but in 2015 he referred to John McCain, the late US senator and navy veteran who spent nearly six years in a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, as a “loser”.
Trump added: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
