The View’s Joy Behar claimed no witnesses have publicly refuted claims in an Atlantic report that President Trump disparaged fallen and wounded soldiers.
She made the claim Tuesday after the White House asserted that more than 20 current and former administration officials have come forward to say they didn’t hear the president make any insulting remarks about U.S. service members.
“We have not heard any denials from any of the people who were in any of these places. If they didn’t hear that, if it didn’t happen, why don’t they open their mouths? Are they scared of the reprisals from the White House? Is that what this is about? I don’t know,” she said before defending the Atlantic’s decision to use anonymous sources.
The report discussed by the co-hosts of the ABC show, back with its first episode following a summer hiatus, was published Thursday. Among the claims in the story, which hinged on unnamed sources, was that Trump called to fallen soldiers as “losers” and dead Marines as “suckers,” rejected a visit to a World War I memorial in France in 2018 because he was worried about what the weather would do to his hair, and asked staff planning for a military parade to keep wounded veterans away.
Not only have Trump officials denied the report, but Trump himself has called it “totally fake.”
No one pushed back on Behar’s claim that there have been no public denials by people who were present, but later in the show, former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who is promoting her new book, denied claims in the Atlantic’s report.
Behar asked Sanders if she was there when the president allegedly asked former chief of staff John Kelly what fallen soldiers get out of dying for their country. The former press secretary said she wasn’t standing right there, but she noted that she served in the administration for about two and a half years. Sanders said she knows who Trump is “at his heart” and “how he has treated veterans and how he has treated men and women of the United States military.”
A number of outlets, including the Washington Post and Fox News, have confirmed parts of the Atlantic’s story.
