'Headaches': Trump under fire for 'trivializing' US soldiers’ traumatic brain injuries

02 October 2024

Donald Trump is once again facing criticism for downplaying the potentially life-threatening traumatic brain injuries sustained by over 100 U.S. soldiers during Iran’s 2020 ballistic missile attacks on two Iraqi bases. He dismissed the injuries—then and now—as mere “headaches,” minimizing the seriousness of the assault which he chose not to respond to during his final year as Commander-in-Chief.

The issue arose during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, told his Republican opponent, U.S. Senator JD Vance, “it was Donald Trump who… we had a coalition of nations that had boxed Iran’s nuclear program in in the inability to advance it. Donald Trump pulled that program and put nothing else in its place.”

Walz was referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly referred to as President Barack Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal, a nuclear arms pact which Trump did pull out of, claiming he would construct a better deal, but never did.

“So Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than they were before because of Donald Trump’s fickle leadership,” Walz continued. “And when Iran shot down an American aircraft in international airspace, Donald Trump tweeted, because that’s the standard diplomacy of Donald Trump. And when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as ‘headaches.’ Look, our allies understand that Donald Trump is fickle. He will go to whoever has the most flattery or where it makes sense to him. Steady leadership like you witnessed today, like you witnessed in April. Both Iranian attacks were repelled. Our coalition is strong, and we need the steady leadership that Kamala Harris is providing.”

On January 7, 2020, immediately after Iran bombed the airbases housing U.S. troops, Trump declared “All is well!” and insisted no one had been injured. He has repeatedly made that claim despite all evidence to the contrary.

Just two weeks later when asked about it by a reporter, Trump held his ground, refusing to acknowledge the injuries.

“I heard that they had headaches, and a couple of other things but I would say, and I can report, it is not very serious,” Trump said in that January 2020 exchange, repeating, “not very serious.”

“You don’t think that a potential traumatic brain injury is very serious?” the reporter, stunned, asked.

“Um, they told me about it numerous days later – you’d have to ask the Dept. of Defense,” Trump replied. “No, I don’t consider them very serious injuries relative to other injuries that I’ve seen.”

But they were serious, and the number of soldiers with traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) jumped from 11 to over 100.

Under Trump, the U.S. Military, contrary, some say, to procedure, refused to grant all of those eligible Purple Hearts.

“The person I was prior to a traumatic brain injury, he’s gone,” Platoon Sergeant Daine Kvasager told CBS News in November of 2021. “There’s parts that remain. The pieces are all still there, just — yeah, he’s not coming back.”

CBS reported, “Kvasager was part of a skeleton crew left to defend the Al Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020. Days earlier, the U.S. had killed the powerful Iranian General Quasem Soleimani, head of the elite Quds military force and the man behind deadly attacks on American bases — but the ballistic missile attack in response would be the biggest against American forces in history.”

“The soldiers CBS spoke with said after the attack, there was pressure to downplay the growing injuries to avoid a further escalation with Iran and avoid undercutting former President Trump.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the world was at “peace” during his entire administration.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump continued to repeat his lie that the soldiers who suffered TBIs just had mere headaches.

“What does ‘injured’ mean? Injured means because they had a headache because the bombs never hit the fort,” Trump told a reporter (video below) who asked him if he regretted not being tougher and nottaking action against Iran after that attack.

“So just so you understand, there was nobody ever tougher on Iraq,” Trump said, misspeaking when he was talking about Iran. “They had no money with me, they would have made any deal with me. I would have had a deal made within, literally, I would have had a deal made within one week after the election. they were dying to make a deal.”

“None of those very accurate missiles hit our fort,” Trump added, as Military.com reported. “They all hit outside. And there was nobody hurt, other than the sound was loud. And some people said that hurt, and I accept that.”

Just hours after Donald Trump made these remarks, his White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah Griffin remarked: “I was Pentagon spox during the Al Assad attack. DOD advised the Trump WH to not claim there were no injuries since initial assessments are often wrong. He went forward & said ‘all is well.’ We later learned 100+ US troops had traumatic brain injuries.”

Military.com on Wednesday also reported, “the service members who suffered the brain injuries have described crippling symptoms, including memory loss, partial vision loss and chronic migraines.”

“There is also a growing body of evidence that TBI is linked to an increased risk of suicide, as reported on extensively by Military.com, as well as other devastating symptoms such as hallucinations and seizures,{ the news site noted. “Nearly 80 service members received Purple Hearts for injuries suffered in the al-Asad attack. For many, the recognition did not come until after Trump left office.”

Veteran Jared Ryan Sears, who writes The Pragmatic Humanist, noted: “Trump is still repeating the headache line when our servicemembers suffered severe head trauma. This is how little Trump cares about our military. He dismisses injuries that happened on his watch because of his strike, and he never did anything to Iran for that attack.”

National security attorney Brad Moss, responding to the video below, wrote: “Here is the Republican nominee trivializing traumatic brain injuries to military personnel who were subjected to missiles attacks from Iran in 2020.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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