Trump attacks military’s top commanders claiming they want to keep defense contractors ‘happy’

President Donald Trump attacked top military commanders on Monday, complaining they just want to keep defense contractors ‘happy’ as he argued soldiers in the field ‘love me.’

In his remarks, he seemed to suggest it was the nation’s top military leaders who were behind an article in The Atlantic, where un-named sources claimed the president called those who fought and died in combat ‘losers’ and ‘suckers.’

‘I’m not saying the military is in love with me; the soldiers are,’ Trump said during a press conference at the White House.

‘The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy,’ he added.

Trump’s attack comes as current and retired military officers have been notably quiet about the allegations in the article, which dropped like a bomb on the White House last week and left them launching a massive counter offensive, including statements from former aides and posting many photos of the president with soldiers on social media. 

Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Tuesday said the president’s comment on military leaders was not directed toward any ‘individual’ but ‘was more directed about the military industrial complex.’

‘He’s not going to let some lobbyists here in Washington DC – just because they want a new defense contract – suggest that [soldiers] need to stay abroad one minute longer than they should. He’s been consistent about stopping these endless wars, he’s going to continue to fight against the special interest groups here in Washington DC,’ Meadows said of President Trump.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper, whom Trump appointed to the job, was defense contractor Raytheon Company’s chief Washington lobbyist before he became Army secretary in 2017.  

Esper defended the president on Friday, citing Trump’s support for the troops but his statement stopped short of an outright denial of the article’s explosive allegations.

‘President Trump has the highest respect and admiration for our nation’s military members, veterans and families,’ Esper said. ‘That is why he has fought for greater pay and more funding for our armed forces.’

Trump has had a strained relationship with the military since he used federal forces to quell Black Lives Matters protests in Washington D.C. in the wake of the death of George Floyd. 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley expressed regret for walking through Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church in what turned out to be a photo op during the June protests. 

Trump has been vigorously defending himself in the wake of the publication of The Atlantic piece last week. At least 14 former staffers who were on the 2018 Paris trip have denied the article’s report, as has first lady Melania Trump.  

The president called the story a ‘hoax.’

‘Only an animal would say a thing like that,’ he said Monday of the allegations in the article. ‘There is nobody that has more respect for not only our military, but for people that gave their lives in the military.’ 

John Kelly, a retired four-star general and former White House chief of staff who was on that trip, has not yet spoken on the record about the allegations made against the president.

Trump side stepped a question at his press conference on Monday as to whether he would ask Kelly to speak publicly on the matter.

On that 2018 Paris trip, according to The Atlantic, the president said he wasn’t going to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris for American soldiers killed in World War I because ‘it’s filled with losers,’ and that Marines slain at Belleau Wood were ‘suckers’ for getting killed.

The White House said the president did not travel to the cemetery because of bad weather, which would not allow him to take Marine One as planned. 

Additionally, the article reported that during a 2017 visit to Arlington National Cemetery, Trump and Kelly stopped in Section 60, to pay respects at the grave of Kelly’s son, Second Lt. Robert Kelly, a Marine who was killed at age 29 in Afghanistan in 2010.

Trump reportedly said to Kelly: ‘I don’t get it. What was in it for them?’ 

Former national security adviser, John Bolton, who was with the president in France at the time – and has shared a number of high profile fallouts with him Trump – went on the record to dispute the Atlantic’s report.

‘I didn’t hear either of those comments or anything even resembling them,’ Bolton told Fox News. ‘I was there at the point in time that morning when it was decided that he would not go Aisne-Marne cemetery … It was entirely a weather-related decision, and I thought the proper thing to do.

‘I never heard he made that kind of comment about another country’s forces either, no.’

Fox correspondent John Roberts, who conducted the Bolton interview, added that he has told him, ‘if [Donald Trump] had said he didn’t want to visit Aisne-Marne because the interred heroes were ‘losers’ and ‘suckers,’ he would have written an entire chapter about it in his book #TheRoomWhereItHappened.’

Former White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, meanwhile, has decried the report as ‘total BS’.

‘I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion – this never happened. I have sat in the room when our President called family members after their sons were killed in action and it was heart-wrenching … I am disgusted by this false attack.’

Other protesting staffers include former Deputy White House Press Secretary Hogan Gidley, who called the report ‘grotesque’; White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Dan Scavino;  and Jordan Karem, personal aide to President Trump. 

Meanwhile, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg told CNN’s ‘Reliable Sources’ on Sunday that he expects ‘more confirmation and new pieces of information’ to come out in the coming days and weeks that will corroborate about the alleged incendiary comments.

Goldberg also addressed his use of anonymous sources, which has come under criticism from the president and others who believe that officials should not be allowed to launch bombshell allegations under the cloak of anonymity – particularly in the build up to an election.

‘These are not people who are anonymous to me,’ Goldberg told CNN. ‘We all have to use anonymous sources especially in a climate in which the president of the United States tries to actively intimidate journalism organizations and people who provide information to journalism organizations.’

Goldberg said his decision to publish the article was made confidently, because of the number of sources he had, and their close ties to the president.

‘The formula is simple,’ he continued. ‘What you do is you have to say, does the public’s right to know or need to know a particular piece of information outweigh the morally complicated and ambiguous qualities of anonymous sourcing.

‘Most of us, most of the time, don’t rely on anonymous sourcing for most things because there are difficulties there. But in this climate, with information that we judge the voters to need, we are going to use anonymous sources because we think the public has a right to know. Especially when you have four or five or six sources, primary sources, corroborating sources, telling you the same thing.’