Lawmakers and military families denounced President Donald Trump’s shocking remarks denigrating NATO troops who were injured and died fighting for the U.S. in Afghanistan after the September 11 terror attacks.
Speaking to Fox Business on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on Thursday, Trump questioned whether NATO “will be there if we ever need them.”
“We’ve never needed them,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, and they did—they stayed a little back, little off the front lines. But we’ve been very good to Europe and to many other countries.”
His message sparked outrage in the U.K., which sent more than 150,000 troops to Afghanistan in the years following the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
The British contingency, which, after the U.S., was the second largest of the campaign, lost 457 soldiers, while thousands more were injured.
“They were absolutely on the front lines,” Lucy Aldridge, whose son William died in Afghanistan when he was 18, told The Mirror. “And to ignore that because, let’s face it, Trump isn’t particularly hot on history… He is so out of touch with the reality, and what it costs in human life. He has no compassion whatsoever for anyone who doesn’t serve him.”
Diane Dernie, whose son Ben Parkinson suffered horrific injuries in Afghanistan in 2006, said Trump’s latest comments were “the ultimate insult.”
Starmer’s official spokesperson pointed out that the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was the only time NATO has invoked Article 5, the alliance’s collective defense principle that treats an attack on one member as an attack on all, The Telegraph reported.
“Their sacrifice and that of other Nato allies was made in the service of collective security and in response to an attack on our ally,” Starmer’s spokesperson said of the soldiers who were wounded and killed. “The president was wrong to diminish the role of NATO troops.”
Starmer later called Trump’s comments about NATO troops “insulting and frankly appalling.”
“I will never forget their courage, their bravery and the sacrifice they made for their country,” he said. “I consider President Trump’s remarks to be insulting and frankly appalling and I am not surprised they have caused such hurt to the loved ones of those who were killed or injured and, in fact, across the country.”
Starmer said Trump should apologize for the comments.
Even the Conservative Party blasted Trump’s remarks, with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch calling them “absolutely appalling” and “disgraceful,” according to The Telegraph.
Conservative member of Parliament Ben Obese-Jecty, who served in Afghanistan as a captain in the Royal Yorkshire Regiment, said it was “sad to see our nation’s sacrifice, and that of our NATO partners, held so cheaply by the president of the United States,” according to ABC.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
The president’s dumping on NATO troops was reminiscent of his previous comments about Americans who died in combat being “suckers” and “losers.”
During a trip to France in 2018, the president said American soldiers who died on French soil during WWI were “losers,” and that U.S. Marines who helped halt the 1918 German advance toward Paris were “suckers” for dying at the hands of the enemy.
The White House denied reports of the comments, which were revealed by The Atlantic magazine in 2020, but they’re just one example of the president disparaging military veterans and their families.
In December, he struggled to muster much sympathy for the families of Americans—many of them U.S. military veterans—who have died fighting in Ukraine.
He has mocked the late Sen. John McCain’s war injuries, publicly insulted the parents of a 27-year-old soldier who died in a car bombing in Iraq, and privately raged about the funeral costs for a female soldier who was murdered by a male soldier at Fort Hood.
