Washington:
President Donald Trump said he never called John McCain a loser — he did — and denigrated the record of the late Republican senator on veterans affairs despite routinely appropriating one of McCain’s crowning achievements on that front as his own. Trump distorted events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, over the past week and his own hand in them before a furor over his reported comments on fallen soldiers diverted his rhetoric.
Democratic rival Joe Biden claimed to have been the first person to have called for the use of emergency production powers in the pandemic, when he was not. A review: VETERANS and McCAIN TRUMP: “I was never a big fan of John McCain, disagreed with him on many things including ridiculous endless wars and the lack of success he had in dealing with the VA and our great Vets.” — part of a series of tweets Thursday.
THE FACTS: He’s ignoring McCain’s singular successes on behalf of fellow veterans. McCain was a leading force in the Senate behind the law that gave veterans an option to go outside the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health care system and get private care at public expense under certain conditions. President Barack Obama signed the VA Choice legislation into law. Ignoring that reality, Trump persistently claims that he brought Choice into law when no one else could.
Trump signed a law in 2018 that expanded the options for using the Choice program established by Obama, McCain and other lawmakers. The 2018 law is named after three lawmakers who were veterans of war. All of them now are dead. They are Rep. Samuel R. Johnson, R-Texas, and Democratic Sen. Daniel K. Akaka, D-Hawaii, and McCain, R-Ariz.
TRUMP: “Also, I never called John a loser and swear on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on, that I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES.” — tweet Thursday. THE FACTS: He called McCain a loser.
In addition, The Associated Press has confirmed many of the comments Trump was reported by The Atlantic to have made disparaging fallen or captured U.S. service members, such as his description of the American dead in a military graveyard as “losers.” As for McCain, Trump told a conservative forum in Iowa in 2015 that his view of McCain changed when McCain lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama. “He lost, so I never liked him as much after that, ’cause I don’t like losers,” he said. Trump went on to dismiss McCain’s war service: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” Trump in 2015 also tweeted a news article on Twitter calling McCain a “loser.” PANDEMIC BIDEN: “When it got up to March, I kept saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to invoke,’ and you remember, I think I was the first — I may be mistaken — person calling for the Defense Production Act.” — comment after a news conference Wednesday. THE FACTS: He is correct about being mistaken.
Biden issued a statement March 18 saying he was issuing a call for Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act to give priority to “and immediately increase domestic production of any critical medical equipment required to respond to this crisis — such as the production of ventilators and associated training to operate.” His call came the same day Trump signed an order to use his authority under the act. Five days earlier a group of Democrats in Congress wrote to Trump asking him to use powers under the act, a step that Trump officials and others had been discussing publicly for several weeks.
PROTESTS and VIOLENCE TRUMP, on Wisconsin officials and the National Guard: “Once they responded and once we took, you know, control of it, things went really well.” — remarks in Kenosha on Tuesday. TRUMP: “One of the reasons I’m making the trip today and going to Wisconsin is we’ve had such a big success in shutting down what would be, right now, a city — that would’ve been Kenosha — a city that would’ve been burnt to the ground by now. … And it all stopped immediately upon the National Guard’s arrival.” — remarks Tuesday before visiting Wisconsin.
THE FACTS: Not true. He had nothing to do with the deployment of the National Guard in Wisconsin. The federal government never “took control of it.” Gov. Tony Evers, D-Wis., activated the state’s National Guard the day after a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake, sparking protests and violence over police actions and racism. When National Guard forces from three other states came in to help, it was because the governor had asked for that help from fellow governors, not the White House. Evers said National Guard troops from Arizona, Michigan and Alabama were operating under the control of those states and Wisconsin, “not in a federal status.” National Guards answer to governors and sometimes state legislatures, not Washington.
The federal government sent deputy marshals from the U.S. Marshals Service and agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, about 200 in all. The restoration of order was primarily in the hands of National Guard units and local law enforcement. As of Monday, 1,000 National Guard troops from Wisconsin were in Kenosha along with 500 National Guard troops from the other three states, said Wisconsin National Guard Maj. Gen. Paul Knapp.
