A 'bizarre" lie from Former President Donald Trump's was prompted by an underlying and justifiable fear that he doesn't stand a chance in Thursday's presidential debate, neoconservative William Kristol wrote for the Bulwark Monday.
The lie in question was Trump's Saturday claim that he's been accused of calling service members who died in action "suckers" and "losers" because his "stupid people" prevented him from refuting it properly years ago.
"Trump, unhappy that this is the case, invents a bizarre lie about it," Kristol writes. "It’s not bothering him because he has a bad conscience about what he said. It’s bothering him because he senses the issue is hurting him."
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Kristol sources Trump's controversial and contested comment to an Atlantic article from September 2020 that relied on four sources with firsthand knowledge of why the then-president canceled a trip to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018.
Those sources reported on Trump calling Marines who died during World War I's Belleau Wood battle "suckers," then saying of the cemetery, "It’s filled with losers.”
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The report also included an anecdote from Memorial Day in 2017 at Arlington National Cemetery, in front of the grave of a Marine officer killed in Afghanistan — the son of then-homeland security secretary Gen. John Kelly.
“I don’t get it," Trump reportedly told Kelly. "What was in it for them?”
Kristol then issues a swift and brutal correction to Trump's assertion that he was prevented from issuing a "refuttal" — as he called a rebuttal Saturday, before declaring, "what the hell word would that be?" — with a list of the many denials Trump immediately issued in 2020.
“I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES," Trump tweeted the same day. Later that evening, Kristol notes,Trump told reporters, “I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes.”
Kristol Monday accused Trump of telling many lies during his speech at the annual Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington D.C. Saturday, but notes he was struck by this one, especially considering Kelly himself has confirmed the Atlantic report.
"No one seriously believes Kelly simply made this up," Kristol writes. "Why the lie now?"
This question Kristol answers by casting his gaze toward the CNN debate Thursday night, when Trump will face off against Biden in the first of at least two such political battles before election night in November.
"What if Biden repeats Trump’s statements and says how reprehensible he finds them?" Kristol writes. "The simmering issue of Trump’s contempt for military service could then come to a full boil. This is why Trump is anxious. As he should be."