Trump calls for Fox News journalist to be fired
for report on war dead scandal
Jennifer Griffin confirmed president called dead
soldiers ‘losers’
Defensive Trump tweets ‘Fox News is gone!’
Donald Trump: ‘Jennifer Griffin should be fired for
this kind of reporting. Never even called us for comment. Fox News is gone!’
Lauren
Aratani
Sat 5 Sep
2020 14.00 BSTFirst published on Sat 5 Sep 2020 13.50 BST
Donald
Trump: ‘Jennifer Griffin should be fired for this kind of reporting. Never even
called us for comment. Fox News is gone!’
The row
over Donald Trump’s alleged remarks denigrating American soldiers has now seen
the US president target one of his core areas of support as he called for a Fox
News journalist who reported details of the scandal to be fired.
The
Atlantic magazine published a story that described how Trump said he cancelled
a visit to pay respects at an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018
because he thought the dead soldiers were “losers” and “suckers”. Other outlets
confirmed the news and detailed more incidents of Trump’s insulting attitude to
American soldiers.
Among those
was the Fox News national security correspondent, Jennifer Griffin, who
confirmed in a Twitter thread that Trump called soldiers “suckers”, had
questioned why anyone would want to become a soldier and had not wanted to
honor war dead at the Aisne-Marne cemetery in France.
Amid
furious denials of the story from the White House and Trump allies, Griffin’s
reporting probably touched a nerve as it came from the usually reliably
pro-Trump Fox News, whose conservative leanings and pro-Trump opinion show
hosts are reliable cheerleaders for the president.
In a tweet
Trump said: “Jennifer Griffin should be fired for this kind of reporting. Never
even called us for comment. Fox News is gone!”
The White
House has moved to deny the report unusually forcefully perhaps fearful of the
scandal’s impact on military-supporting conservatives. Trump himself dismissed
it as a politically motivated “hoax”.
“There is
nobody feels more strongly about our soldiers, our wounded warriors, our soldiers
that died in war than I do,” he told reporters at the White House on Friday.
“It’s a hoax,” he said on Friday night.
The first
lady, Melania Trump, also weighed in, in a rare political intervention tweeting
that the Atlantic story “was not true”.
But Trump’s
former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired marine corps general, has remained
notably silent about the president’s comments.
The
Atlantic reported that Trump accompanied Kelly, who was the homeland security
secretary at the time, to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2017.
While standing at the grave of Kelly’s son, who was killed in Afghanistan in
2010, Trump reportedly turned to Kelly and said: “I don’t get it. What’s in it
for them?”
Multiple
reports say that close friends and associates of Kelly have encouraged him to
speak out, but Kelly has refused on-the-record interviews about the comments.
Anthony C
Zinni, a retired marine corps general and close friend of Kelly, told the New
York Times that Kelly is likely trying to “avoid taking a position that might
be perceived as political”.
“I also
think he takes to heart the commitment to confidentiality in matters related to
their interaction with the president,” he said.
Meanwhile,
Trump, who has speculated that Kelly might have been a source for the Atlantic
story, said on Friday that Kelly “was totally exhausted” and “wasn’t even able
to function in the last number of months” during his time in the Oval Office.
Other
senior military officials, including Jim Mattis, also a retired marine corps
general and Trump’s former secretary of defense, have been silent about the
comment.
Trump’s
Democratic challenger, the former vice-president Joe Biden, pounced on the news
amid broad-ranging condemnation of Trump’s reported remark. Biden called the
alleged comments “disgusting” and said Trump was “not fit to be
commander-in-chief”.
“When my
son volunteered and joined the United States military – and went to Iraq for a
year, won the Bronze Star and other commendations, he was not a sucker,” Biden
said in emotional remarks in Wilmington, Delaware.
His son
Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015, deployed to Iraq in 2008.
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