Trump’s Disgusting Comment on Veterans Sparks Uproar

Donald Trump has angered veterans by claiming that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor.

The Republican presidential nominee, who famously avoided the Vietnam War draft with a timely diagnosis of bone spurs, denigrated the value of the Medal of Honor at a campaign event in New Jersey Thursday night by claiming that the award’s civilian variant is “much better.” According to Trump, that’s because the military medal’s recipients, who receive the honor for valor in combat, are usually “in very bad shape” since they’ve been “hit so many times” by bullets.

“That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version,” Trump said, mistakenly referring to the honor bestowed for valor in combat. “But civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

Trump mentioned the award after he was introduced by one of his top patrons, Miriam Adelson, a heavy-handed Republican donor who became the richest Israeli in the world after her husband, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, died in 2021. The couple earned Trump’s favor after they funneled $25 million to Trump’s super PACs in 2016 and donated $5 million to his inauguration. That earned them a spot on the dais, just a few rows behind Jared Kushner, as Trump was sworn in. In 2018, their contributions effectively bought Mrs. Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2019 influenced Trump to recognize Israel’s sovereignty in Golan Heights, an Israeli-occupied portion of southwest Syria that the religious state captured in 1967.

Four years later, the Adelsons eclipsed their previous spending on the pro-Israel politico with a $90 million donation, and gave $300 million to Republican-focused Senate and congressional Leadership Funds, outspending the next three donors combined, according to Intelligencer.

“She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she got it for—and that’s through committees and everything else,” Trump said, referring to Adelson. “I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

The comments rubbed veterans the wrong way, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a bipartisan super PAC, highlighted the clip from Thursday’s event, writing on X that Trump believes the Medal of Honor is “secondary to the medal he gives his billionaire funders.”

“He doesn’t care about our military or their sacrifices,” they added.

Retired Navy intelligence officer and veterans’ advocate Travis Akers felt similarly, posting on Friday that Trump’s comments were “like a fever dream.” In a separate post, Akers said Trump’s remarks were “disgusting” and “offensive on so many levels.”

“I am still trying to wrap my head around how grossly and despicably Donald Trump insulted Medal of Honor recipients last night,” Akers said.

House Oversight Chair James Comer has launched an investigation into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, his second probe into Donald Trump’s opposition in less than a week.

Comer alleged that Walz has a “longstanding cozy relationship with China” and has connections to the Chinese Communist Party, according to a press release published by the committee on Friday.

“Mr. Walz has visited China dozens of times, served as a fellow at a Chinese institution that maintains a devotion to the CCP, and spoke alongside the President of a Chinese organization the State Department exposed as a CCP effort to influence and co-opt local leaders,” Comer said. “FBI briefers recently informed the Committee that the Bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force investigates CCP activity that is similar to China’s engagement with Governor Walz. The American people deserve to fully understand how deep Governor Walz’s relationship with China goes.”

In a letter to FBI head Christopher Wray, Comer wrote that he was investigating Walz as part of a government-wide probe into the CCP’s “political warfare operations against America.” Comer claimed that Walz has “problematic engagement with concerning entities and individuals.”

But Comer only listed one: Consul General Zhao Jian, a Chinese diplomat, lower-ranking than an ambassador, who works across nine Midwestern states—including Minnesota. Comer said Zhao and Walz only met once.

Comer requested that the FBI turn over all of its documents on “any Chinese entity or individual with whom Mr. Walz may have engaged or partnered,” as well as any guidance the FBI may have given Walz about engaging with China.

Walz is said to have traveled to China an estimated 30 times, and set up a program to take high school students on educational trips there in the 1990s and 2000s.

As a member of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, Walz was able to use his firsthand knowledge of China to wield well-informed criticisms of China’s government and its reported human rights abuses, according to The New York Times.

Walz was also credited with being one of the only Democrats to support the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which required the U.S. to sanction officials who committed human rights abuses in Hong Kong, keeping it alive until it was eventually passed.

This isn’t even the first time this week that Comer has gone after one of Trump’s opponents. Comer launched a probe into Vice President Kamala Harris’s involvement with work on the U.S. southern border on Monday. He previously attempted a similar gambit by spearheading an investigation into the Biden family—which crumbled, having not produced any evidence of the president, or his family’s, supposed wrongdoings.

Right-wingers are spreading another conspiracy about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: he’s lying about liking “white guy tacos.”

Kamala Harris and her running mate on Thursday posted a promotional video of them discussing food, during which Walz brought up his Midwestern palette.

“I have white guy tacos,” said Walz.

 “What does that mean? Like, mayonnaise and tuna? What are you doing?” Harris responded jokingly.

“Pretty much ground beef and cheese,” Walz said. “They said to be careful and let her know this. That black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota.”

The innocent exchange led to a total Republican meltdown.

“Why is Kamala the expert on tacos?” asked Fox & Friends co-host Will Cain. “Did she say white guy tacos are tuna in mayonnaise?”

Conservative provocateur Mike Cernovich took it further, accusing Walz of lying about skipping seasoning. “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”

Cernovich pointed to a 2016 award-winning recipe by the Minnesota governor for “Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish,” which included the spices paprika, chili powder, onion powder, and garlic powder.  “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”

Even Senator Ted Cruz got in on the drama, writing, “hispanics are not tacos.” Unclear what he meant there. 

It seems like Republicans will find anything to get mad about if it comes from Harris and Walz—maybe they’ll eventually launch an investigation on what actually goes into “white guy tacos.”

Right-wing influencers Candace Owens and Andrew Tate think Donald Trump has been compromised by the so-called “deep state.”

Tate appeared on Owens’s YouTube show Candace, and Owens raised the idea that Trump has changed since his first presidential campaign, and it’s because of money.

“It doesn’t feel to me like the same Trump from 2015,” Owens said in the episode released on Thursday. “And obviously he’s the better candidate. I want Trump to win as well, but it does seem that now he’s accepted money that he can’t be as hardcore about certain topics and certain issues as he was back in 2015 when there was no chance he was gonna win.

“Now it feels like, I don’t know, like they’ve kind of—I don’t wanna say buck-broken him, but there’s definitely a lot of consultants around,” Owens continued, using a term referring to physically punishing or sexually assaulting a male slave in front of other slaves to humiliate him.

Tate concurred, saying that he’s “a fan of Trump” too, and posited a theory that Trump tried to reason with his opponents during his time as president.

“I think there was part of his mind that said, ‘You know what, I’m really gonna get back into administration and teach these guys a lesson,’ and then I think something happened,” Tate said.

“Someone came along at some point and I think perhaps that deal was done, they said, ‘You won’t go to jail, Trump Tower will stay standing, your kids will be safe in America, everything’s gonna be OK, but you’re gonna have to bend on these few things,’” Tate added.

Tate further expanded on his conspiracy theory, claiming that while he was praying for a Trump victory, he thinks the former president and convicted felon has cut some kind of deal with the deep state to protect himself and his family.

“I just feel like somewhere along the line, something has been agreed to to prevent postpresidency or post-death for his empire and for his children,” Tate said. “There seems to be some kind of deal somewhere … I don’t know exactly what the deal is. I’m not even gonna say that I blame the guy for taking it. But some kind of agreement’s been made.”

The idea that Trump has been tamed in his campaign cycle this time around beggars belief. Are Tate and Owens referring to his attempts to disavow the Project 2025 manifesto, or his reduced travel schedule following the attempt on his life last month? Because it’s pretty clear Trump isn’t trying to tamp down his rhetoric. And they’re not the only ones: Trump has also lost the support of white nationalists like Nick Fuentes. Maybe they all are finally noticing Trump’s apparent cognitive decline.

Six months ago and under the gun for roughly half a billion dollars in legal expenses, Donald Trump took on a flurry of bizarre get-rich-quick schemes to raise some capital. They included a line of NFTs featuring cartoonish images of himself dressed up as superhero characters; a line of gold, high-top sneakers that retailed for $399 a pop; and, bizarrely, his own Bible series.

Trump pitched his God Bless the USA Bible alongside singer Lee Greenwood, the man who popularized the song it’s named after. The selling point boiled down to a callback to Trump’s campaign: “We must make America pray again.”

“Yes, this is the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” the site advertised.

And while it’s unclear if the Trump-endorsed, $60 religious text actually made more people pray, it certainly did help line the convicted felon’s pockets. According to Trump’s latest financial disclosure, that far-flung idea actually brought in $300,000 in royalties. Those numbers could have been bolstered by an even pricier signed version, which retailed for $1,000.

It wasn’t the only book that Trump made some cash off of. His book Letters to Trump, which featured a letter from former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown—who disputed Trump’s claim that the two had shared a near-death experience in a helicopter together—raked in $4.5 million. One of his more recents books, A MAGA Journey, netted $505,763, while Trump’s bestseller, The Art of the Deal, managed to bring in between $50,000 and $100,000 in royalties.

But Trump’s other weird money streams also helped bring in some quick cash. The disclosure listed $7.15 million coming from a source labeled NFT INT., likely referring to his NFT series. And, despite having previously labeled cryptocurrency as a scam, the former president notably kept a stockpile of cash in the new-wave currencies, with the disclosure listing roughly $5 million in crypto.

Trump listed his social media platform, Truth Social, at more than $50 million. Trump owns nearly 65 percent of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. The company’s stock value has plummeted in recent days.

Still, the disclosure couldn’t offset Trump’s legal reality: It lists more than $100 million for bonds related to three of his legal trials in New York.