An article was recently published in the Atlantic that accused Donald Trump of being cheap, racist, and disrespectful to a slain military officer and her family — all allegations that are easy AF to believe due to Trump’s easily verifiable track record of being a money-grubbing racist who is consistently disrespectful to military personnel and their family members. (More on that in a sec.)
Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty
In the article, the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, alleged that Trump welched on his promise to pay the funeral costs of Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private who was bludgeoned to death by another solider in 2020 at Ford Hood in Texas, once he found out what the cost of her funeral would be.
“‘It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fââââââ Mexican!’” Trump said, according to Goldberg. “He later turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: ‘Don’t pay it!’”
But Guillén’s sister, Mayra Guillén, denied that Trump said what the article claimed, and she expressed disappointment in the publication for what she alleged was a media ploy to score political points off of her sister’s death.
“Wow. I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics- hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members,” Mayra posted on X Tuesday. “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.”
The article claimed that Guillén’s family attorney, Natalie Khawam, told the Atlantic that she sent the bill for the funeral to the White House but no money was ever received. Khawam claims Goldberg misrepresented what she actually said.
“Not only did he misrepresent our conversation but he outright LIED in HIS sensational story,” Khawam tweeted. “More importantly, he used and exploited my clients, and Vanessa Guillen’s murder… for cheap political gain.”
Of course, Khawam wasn’t at all specific about how Goldberg misquoted her; she just called him a liar and got the MAGA conspiracy theorists all revved up by noting “the timing of this ‘story,’” which she called “quite suspicious.”
The Atlantic eventually published a statement sent by Trump campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer, who wrote that the allegations were “absolutely false.”
“President Donald Trump has spent his life caring for America’s military heroes…,” Pfeiffer wrote. “There has been no greater advocate for our brave military men and women than Donald J. Trump.”
And there it is.
Source: The Washington Post / Getty
See, they almost had me. For a second, I almost thought to myself: “Well, sh*t. Maybe it actually was “fake news” this one time. Maybe Goldberg conjured up a fake racist Trump quote that sounded nearly identical to a myriad of actual racist Trump quotes. Maybe the pathological-liar-in-chief just got served a pinch of his own medicine, and, if so, that was wrong.
But then Trump’s campaign reminded me that there’s no reason to take the denial of MAGA minions at face value — because, seriously, Trump “has spent his life caring for America’s military heroes” and “there has been no greater advocate” that he?
Pfeiffer couldn’t be talking about the same Donald Trump who, just in August, bragged that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is a “better” award than the Medal of Honor because that medal is only received by “soldiers” who are either “dead” or in “bad shape” because they’ve been shot so many times. This couldn’t be the same Trump who, at the beginning of this month, described the traumatic brain injuries that 109 U.S. service members were diagnosed with as “a headache.” Perhaps Trump’s campaign has forgotten the time when an allegation was co-signed by at least one of his own former senior administration officials that he called U.S. military soldiers killed in combat “suckers” and “losers.” Maybe it slipped his handlers’ minds that he allegedly disrespected the widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson by telling her the Black veteran who died in combat in 2017 knew “what he signed up for.” (Trump has also been accused of mocking Johnson’s death.)
But even if Trump’s people had forgotten all of that, I know damn well they remember when the accused-draft-dodger-in-chief said this about late combat veteran John McCain:
“He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Again, whether Trump actually said what the Atlantic reported he said about Vanessa Guillén, his record easily indicates why it’s not an implausible story.
Whatever, I believe it.
