Former President Donald Trump on Thursday said the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, “is actually much better” than the Medal of Honor, because service members who receive the nation’s highest military decoration are often wounded or awarded it posthumously. Trump was praising Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson, whom he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom while in office, during remarks at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
“Miriam, I watched (Sheldon Adelson, her late husband) sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian, it’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor – that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead,” Trump said.
It’s the latest in Trump’s
history of making disparaging comments about military service. Early in his first presidential campaign, Trump
attracted controversy by claiming then-Sen. John McCain — a political rival who served as a naval aviator during the Vietnam War and was imprisoned for more than five years by the North Vietnamese, during which he suffered injuries that
would affect him for the rest of his life — was “not a war hero.”
Then, in 2020, The Atlantic
reported that Trump said privately during a 2018 trip to France that he did not want to visit the graves of American service members and proceeded to refer to the fallen soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” Trump has repeatedly denied making the remark.