A new book from a White House insider portrayed President Trump as deeply anguished over military deaths and promising to pull troops from “somebody else’s civil war.”
Written well before anonymous sources told the Atlantic that the president considered war dead “losers,” former press secretary Sarah Sanders opens her new book with new details about Trump’s Christmas 2018 trip to Al Asad Air Base, Iraq, and calls he has made to families of troops killed in battle.
“I have sat with the president in the Oval Office as he made calls to family members after their sons were killed in action,” Sanders wrote in Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House.
“He said it’s the hardest part of the job. After one of these calls, the president hung up, looked at me, and said, ‘My, Sarah, it’s so awful. These beautiful kids never come back. Their parents are so crushed. I never want another brave American to be killed in somebody else’s civil war,’” she wrote.
She added, “These were some of the rare instances I saw the president fully let his guard down, show his heart, and be completely vulnerable. President Trump isn’t perfect, he isn’t always easy, but he loves the American people and is willing to fight for them even if that means fighting alone.”
The book gives the White House new ammunition to fight the claims in the magazine. Those claims have been seized upon by Democratic foe Joe Biden in his escalating attacks on Trump.
The White House has vehemently denied the magazine’s story, and several aides have come to his defense.
Sanders’s book opens with stories about Trump’s devotion to troops and promise to withdraw from old war zones. It provides emphasis for Trump aides who have said the president has been supportive of the troops, though not always the brass.
During the Christmas trip to Iraq, Sanders recalled how “the president and first lady went by each table individually thanking the troops and wished them a Merry Christmas.”
She also colored in some facts of Trump’s meeting with his generals during which he ordered them to “finish off” the Islamic State.
“The president loves talking to people in the trenches doing the actual work to find out the solution to a problem. I suspect it’s from years of talking to foremen and workers at job sites around the world,” she wrote in the book released on Tuesday from St. Martin’s Press.
