Donald Trump’s Comment on Injured Soldiers Sparks Veteran Anger—’Insulting’

Former president Donald Trump has been called out by veterans after he again downplayed the traumatic brain injuries suffered by U.S troops in an Iranian missile strike on an airbase in Iraq in 2020.
At a campaign event in Milwaukee, Trump, the Republican nominee, was asked if he should have been tougher on Tehran after more than 100 soldiers were injured in a missile attack on the Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq in January 2020, when he was president.
“So first of all, injured. What does injured mean? Injured means, you mean because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort,” Trump said. “So just so you understand, there was nobody ever tougher on Iraq,” he added, apparently misspeaking by saying Iraq rather than Iran.
Trump, who has a history of controversies involving the military and veterans, had sparked criticism for downplaying the injuries in the days after the attack. “I heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things,” he told reporters in 2020, adding that the injuries were “not very serious.”
Dan Barkhuff, the president and founder of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, told Newsweek that Trump’s comments were “really insulting” and “wrong.”
“It shows a huge lack of understanding of what our military deals with and the nature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and really modern combat in general,” said Barkhuff, a former Navy SEAL who is now an ER physician and director of trauma education at the University of Vermont.
Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who sustained injuries in explosive blasts have been left with “long-lasting neurological effects,” he said. “These are documented medical injuries. You can see them on imaging with MRIs and things like that. There’s no doubt that these are real, objective injuries that veterans sustained, and they can be incredibly debilitating.
“We have a generation of folks who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and some who weren’t even considered wounded at the time, and are now developing the sequela of these injuries… these are things like early dementia, periods of unconsciousness, difficulty with daily tasks.
“These are incredibly debilitating injuries, and it’s really insulting that Donald Trump would comment in this way about folks who were injured in combat.”
Newsweek has contacted the Trump campaign for comment via email.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who served 24 years with the Minnesota National Guard, took aim at Trump over the comments during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate.
Iran is closer to having nuclear weapons “because of Donald Trump’s fickle leadership,” he said. “And when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches.”
Others took to social media to criticize Trump over the comments.
“This man doesn’t deserve to lead our armed forces again. Period,” Mike Lavigne, an Army veteran and senior adviser at the nonprofit organization Vote Vets, wrote on X.
The Veterans for Harris account wrote: “This is one of the most vile comments Trump has ever made. Over 100 soldiers deployed were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries due to a missile attack while Trump was POTUS and he calls them headaches?!”