Donald Trump shockingly didn’t visit any of the 14 troops injured during the Iran war and now recovering at Walter Reed Military Medical Center when he went there on Tuesday.
Trump bypassed all of those troops at the Army medical center while he was there for his fourth physical examination of his second term, CBS News reported, citing one soldier’s family and a military official familiar with his visit.
Just 24 hours before, on Memorial Day, Trump said at Arlington National Cemetery that the 13 Americans who died in the war were “wonderful souls.” And during Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting, he added: “We want to lose very few, we want very few to be injured. We’re very careful, but war is war. War is dangerous.”
The White House declined to answer why Trump skipped seeing the troops injured in the war he began alongside Israel nearly three months ago, and which continues still.
“President Trump was honored to meet with our amazing service members and medical staff while at Walter Reed Medical Center,” a spokesperson told CBS News.
The Daily Beast has reached out for comment as well but did not get an immediate response.
The Defense Department says 409 troops have been injured in the war thus far.
One of them, Sergeant Cory Hicks, is at Walter Reed after having suffered a traumatic brain injury and severe damage to a kidney and his spleen from an Iranian drone attack in Kuwait in March. That attack killed six Americans and injured over 20, six of whom remain at the hospital.
“I lost six of my battle buddies who were sitting pretty close to me and that’s a struggle within itself,” Hicks told CBS Minnesota in April. “The invisible wounds are hard to heal. A lot of them were further away from the blast than I was, so when you go through something like that, you go through a lot of guilt.”
On more than one occasion, Trump has downplayed brain injuries resulting from January 2020 Iranian airstrikes on troops in Iraq as mere “headaches.” Soon after the strikes, he falsely claimed that “no Americans were harmed,” when in fact 109 troops had suffered traumatic brain injuries, according to the Defense Department.
