Multiple reports have multiple sources saying that yes, Donald Trump has referred to prisoners of war and military service members killed in combat as “losers” and “suckers.” Trump's denials just don't hold water, but you wouldn't know it from reading The New York Times report on those denials.
Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman pass up chance after chance in the early paragraphs of the article to explain why the reports of Trump’s contempt for service members are more believable than Trump's denials. So we get a “visibly angry” Trump “[m]arching over to reporters” to say things like “I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more” and “What animal would say such a thing?” But it’s several more paragraphs before we get a few of the things that Trump has said publicly that show just how believable the reports in The Atlantic and The Washington Post are.
In the fifth paragraph of the article, Baker and Haberman cite the reports of Trump calling the late Sen. John McCain a “fucking loser,” but it’s not until 14 paragraphs later, five paragraphs from the bottom of the story, that Baker and Haberman point out that those specific reports are in line with Trump having very publicly said of McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump also called McCain a "dummy" and a "loser." Trump is now denying having ever called McCain a loser.
Baker and Haberman write, in the manner of those repeating established knowledge: “People familiar with Mr. Trump’s comments say he has long scorned those who served in Vietnam as being too dumb to have gotten out of it, as he did through a medical diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels. At other times, according to those familiar with the remarks, Mr. Trump would marvel at people choosing military service over making money.”
This is established knowledge, and it’s exactly the kind of report that is now making news. But yet they still led with Trump’s denial, straight, no real context. In the early paragraphs of the story—the ones that, let’s face it, are all many people read—Trump’s angry denials are center stage without the context of all of these reasons for believing that yes, Trump definitely would have done something like refuse to visit a World War I cemetery because he believed the troops buried there were “losers.”
The New York Times clearly set out to write an article giving Trump’s denials close to equal standing with the reporting of his contempt for service members. That’s the plan here, with just enough context sprinkled into the later paragraphs of the piece to make for plausible deniability that they gave Trump too much credence. That said, there are people who could set this all to rest, starting with Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, the retired Marine general to whom Trump said some of the worst things he’s reported saying, including comments at the grave of Kelly’s son. It’s clear that Kelly is either a direct source for The Atlantic or the other outlets, or that he gave friends permission to speak to reporters. He—along with the other sources for these pieces—needs to have the courage to come forward and speak publicly, under his own name. Then let’s see how the Times would run Trump’s denials.
