Trump criticized for reported military comments: ‘He doesn’t understand bravery’ – live | US news

Speaking from the Oval Office on Friday, Trump publicly denied the Atlantic article and claimed to have done more for the military than “almost anybody.”

Asked if he should apologize for his comments about service members, as reported by the Atlantic, Trump said: “No, it was a fake story.”

Contrary to the report, Trump said he does not consider those who died in combat to be “suckers” or “losers” but to be “absolute heroes.”

“It was a terrible thing that somebody could say the kinds of things –especially to me, because I’ve done more for the military than almost anybody else,” he told reporters, during a signing ceremony with the president of Serbia and the prime minister of Kosovo regarding the increased economic normalization between the two nations.

One achievement Trump has repeatedly taken credit for is the Veterans Choice program. But that was signed into law in 2014, by then-president Barack Obama.

The Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, voted unanimously in favor of endorsing Trump this election cycle, praising him as “America’s law and order president.”

“Look at what the national discourse has focused on for the last six months, Patrick Yoes, the group’s president, said in a statement. “President Trump has shown time after time that he supports our law enforcement officers and understands the issues our members face every day. The FOP is proud to endorse a candidate who calls for law and order across our nation. He has the full and enthusiastic support of the FOP.”

The endorsement comes amid a roiling national debate over police brutality and systemic racism in law enforcement after a summer of unrest in response to a series of high-profile and often lethal encounters between Black Americans and white officers.

Amid scenes of street violence that has occurred alongside mostly peaceful protests, Trump has reoriented his campaign around a message of law-and-order, in an attempt to boost his standing against Biden.

During a visit this week to Kenosha, where protests continued for a second week in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, Trump focused on the violence that had erupted there and deflected protesters concerns about racism.

Update: Facebook spokesman Andy Stone says the company has removed the image by Republican candidate Marjorie Greene after journalists highlighted her remarks.

Greene used a past decision by Facebook to remove one of her ads to decry the alleged bias of Big Tech and rally supporters around her anti-establishment message.

Republican candidate Marjorie Green Taylor, who has expressed support for the baseless conspiracy theory Qanon and is all-but certain to win her race in a heavily Republican Georgia congressional district, has posted a Facebook photo of herself wielding a gun next to images of three progressive congresswomen.

The post, published on Thursday, includes members of the so-called “Squad”, including Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress, as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive New York Democrat and Republican bête noire. It’s captioned: “Squad’s worst nightmare.”

“SAVE AMERICA. STOP SOCIALISM. DEFEAT THE DEMOCRATS!” says the accompanying post, which is signed “Marjorie.”

Greene has said that Muslims do not belong in government.

After she won her runoff primary in August, Trump hailed Greene as a “future Republican star.”

Facebook previously removed an ad in which Greene brandished a rifle and threatened Antifa protesters, saying the content violated its policies against inciting violence.

Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Purple Heart recipient who lost both of her legs during a combat mission in Iraq, lashed Trump for his comments about American service members, accusing him of attempting to “politicize and pervert our military to stroke his own ego,” on a press call hosted by Biden’s campaign.

This is a man who spends every day redefining the concept of narcissism; a man who’s lead a life of privilege, with everything handed to him on a silver platter. Of course, he thinks about war selfishly. He thinks of it as a transactional cost, instead of in human lives and American blood spilled, because that’s how he’s viewed his whole life. He doesn’t understand other people’s bravery and courage because he’s never had any of his own.

“I take my wheelchair, and my titanium legs over Donald Trump suppose that bone spurs any day,” she added, referring to the reason Trump received draft deferments during the Vietnam war.

Duckworth, who was vetted to be Biden’s running mate, has nicknamed Trump “Cadet Bone Spurs.”

The call also included Democratic congressman Conor Lamb, a Marine veteran and Khzir Khan, a Gold star father whose son was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004.

Khan said Trump is “incapable – let me repeat it again – he is incapable of understanding service, valor and courage.”

“His soul cannot conceive of integrity and honor,” Khan continued. “His soul is that of a coward.”

Asked if the anonymously quoted sources should come forward publicly, Duckworth and Lamb said that was their prerogative, but stressed that the private episodes detailed in the story echo what Trump has said publicly. They hoped this story would help sharpen the contrast between Trump and Biden, whose late son, Beau, whose National Guard unit deployed to Iraq in 2008.

Read more from my colleague David Smith, who interviewed Khan last month:

USA Today has obtained a memo from the Pentagon that orders the publisher of Stars and Stripes to present a plan to shutter the military newspaper by 15 September.

Kathy Kiely, an opinion contributor at USA Today, writes:

In a heretofore unpublicized recent memo, the Pentagon delivered an order to shutter Stars and Stripes, a newspaper that has been a lifeline and a voice for American troops since the Civil War. The memo orders the publisher of the news organization (which now publishes online as well as in print) to present a plan that “dissolves the Stars and Stripes” by Sept. 15 including “specific timeline for vacating government owned/leased space worldwide.

The last newspaper publication (in all forms) will be September 30, 2020,” writes Col. Paul Haverstick Jr., the memo’s author.

The newspaper began publication during the American civil war and remains the “local paper” of the military, delivered daily to troops stationed around the world, including those on the frontlines.

This Tweet was shared by the official account of Stars and Stripes.

A new ABC News/Ipsos poll release on Friday found that a majority of Americans believe Trump’s response to the protests has made the unrest worse, not better.

Fifty-five percent of Americans in the new poll say they think Trump is aggravating the situation, while 13% say they think he is making it better.

Fewer than one-third, 29%, believe what Trump has said on the topic has had no effect on the protests over racial injustice,” ABC reports.

Among his base, 30% of Republicans say the president is improving the situation, compared to 26% who say he’s having an adverse impact. Only 18% of white, non-college educated Americans, another core constituency for the president, believe he is having a positive effect on the protests, while 41% view his comments on the demonstrations amid the debate over racial equality as having a negative influence.”

The findings call into question the effectiveness of Trump’s attempt to reframe the race against Biden around his “law and order” messaging

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the president’s support of members of the military in an interview on Friday morning.

Speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt, Pompeo said he had not read the Atlantic article but insisted the description does not comport with what he knows about Trump.

“I’ve never heard that. Indeed, just the opposite,” Pompeo told the radio host. “I’ve been around him in lots of settings where there were both active duty military, Guardsmen, reservists, veterans. This is a man who had the deepest respect for their service, and he always, he always interacted with them in that way. He enjoys those times. He values those people.”

Yet the comments echo those that Trump made publicly about Senator John McCain as a presidential candidate, when he said he preferred people who “weren’t captured.”

“He lost and let us down,” Trump continued in 2015, referring to McCain’s capture and subsequent torture in Vietnam. “I’ve never liked him as much after that.”

The Atlantic article, citing anonymous sources, says that Trump used similar language to privately describe members of the military who were captured or killed in combat.

Trump received deferments from Vietnam because of alleged bone spurs in his feet and has claimed avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was his “personal Vietnam.”

The US economy added 1.4 million jobs in August, the Labor Department said on Friday, as unemployment fell below 10% for the first time since the coronavirus forced the nation to halt economic activity.

The Trump campaign seized on the toplines, claiming that Trump has positioned the US to “reopen faster than doomsayers like Biden predicted.”

But the Guardian’s Dominic Rushe reports that there are troubling signs in the numbers.

“August’s figure was also boosted by the temporary hiring of 238,000 people to conduct the 2020 Census,” he writes.

“The racial disparities in unemployment remained. The unemployment rate for Black Americans (13%) was almost double the rate for whites (7.3%). The rate for Latinx Americans was 10.5% and for Asians, 10.7%.”

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s coverage of US political news.

Today we’re watching the fallout from a stunning report in the Atlantic – and later confirmed by the Associated Press and the Washington Post – detailing multiple occasions in which Donald Trump disparaged members of the US military who have been captured or killed as “suckers” and “losers”. The White House vehemently denied the story, calling it “reprehensible lies” while Trump falsely claimed that he “never called” Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam who died in 2018, a “loser.”

The story broke hours before North Carolina, which has one of the largest military populations in the US, began sending out absentee ballots to voters on Friday.

At a rally in the state on Wednesday, Trump suggested voters in North Carolina vote by mail and in person in November’s election, prompting a sharp response from the state’s election chief.

“It is illegal to vote twice in an election,” said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina state board of elections, said in a statement.

Trump today will greet the president of Serbia and the prime minister of Kosovo for a signing ceremony and a trilateral meeting.

Biden is due to give remarks on “the economic crisis that has been worsened by Trump’s failure to get the virus under control” from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, later this afternoon.