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Former president Donald Trump on Thursday continued his pattern of insulting the country’s most revered military veterans by claiming a top civilian award is more prestigious than the Medal of Honor awarded to service members for “conspicuous gallantry” in the face of enemy fire.
Trump was speaking to a group of Jewish Republicans at his New Jersey golf club after being introduced by Miriam Adelson, a wealthy GOP donor who is the billionaire widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. The ex-president awarded Miriam Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, in 2018.
He recalled giving her the award during his time in the White House and described it as “the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor,” the military’s highest award bestowed on service members for extreme bravery during combat. The award is actually called the Medal of Honor, but it’s awarded “in the name of Congress” by the president.
Trump also claimed the Medal of Freedom is the “civilian version” of the military decoration — though it is not — and said the civilian award is “better” because “everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”
“She [Adelson] gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she got it for — and that’s through committees and everything else,” he added.
The Medal of Freedom was created in 1963 by then-president John F Kennedy to honor civilians who’ve made contributions to the “interests of the United States,” “world peace” or other cultural or “significant public or private endeavors.”
The presidential unilaterally decides who gets it, though they can do so on recommendation of a committee established for determining recipients.
The Medal of Honor is far older and traces its roots to 1861 during the American Civil War. It has been awarded to 3,519 people, and earning it in the modern military requires a service member to distinguish himself “conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty” during active combat against a foreign adversary.
Nominees must have their actions documented by multiple witnesses and approved by their chain of command, with final approval from the president. Many of the service members who’ve received it in the years since the end of the Second World War have been decorated posthumously, though there are current 60 living recipients of the medal.
The ex-president’s disparagement of veterans comes as he and his running-mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, have tried to denigrate the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for having retired from the National Guard before his unit deployed to Iraq in 2005.
Vance has accused Walz of deserting his unit, even though the Minnesota governor served nearly a quarter-century in uniform and opted to retire four years after becoming eligible so he could run for Congress in the 2006 election. Military records confirm Walz’s account of how his time in the service came to an end, though the Trump-Vance campaign has continued to push the accusations against Walz.
But Trump has a checkered history of insulting and denigrating veterans, decades after he avoided service in the Vietnam War by claiming to have bone spurs in his feet.
In 2020, The Atlantic reported that Trump referred to deceased service members as “suckers” and “losers” when he refused to visit a military cemetery in France because the rain falling there at the time would have made his hair look bad.
A spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, Sarafina Chitika, slammed the ex-president’s comments denigrating Medal of Honor recipients in a statement, writing that he “knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself.”
“For him to insult Medal of Honor recipients, just as he has previously attacked Gold Star families, mocked prisoners of war, and referred to those who lost their lives in service to our country as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’ should remind all Americans that we owe it to our service members, our country, and our future to make sure Donald Trump is never our nation’s commander in chief again,” she added.
