At a campaign event with Jewish supporters late Thursday in New Jersey, Trump turned to Miriam Adelson and noted that during his time in the White House he'd given her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He said that Adelson -- a major campaign donor and widow of the late Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson -- had received an award "better" than the more famous Medal of Honor, which is only given to members of the military for acts of extreme bravery.
The civilian version is "the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor," Trump said, although the military award is not called "congressional."
"It's actually much better because everyone who gets the Congressional Medal, they're soldiers," he continued. "They're either in very bad shape, because they've been hit so many times by bullets, or they're dead."
Adelson, by contrast, "she gets it and she's a healthy beautiful woman."
A spokesperson for Democrat Kamala Harris, who is running against Trump in the November election, said the Republican "knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself."
Democratic congressman Dean Phillips posted on X that his father had died in combat and called Trump a "repulsive, ignorant, megalomaniac."
And VoteVets, which backs Democratic veterans running for office, said Trump "doesn't respect veterans and their sacrifice."
Florent Groberg, a former soldier who was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2015 for saving members of his patrol in Afghanistan from suicide bombers, posted that he had "tremendous" respect for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
However, the presidential award is "not quite comparable to the Medal of Honor, as they are two very different awards with different criteria and significance," he wrote on X.
Trump frequently touts his support for the military on the campaign trail and also did while he served as president. However, he has a history of making unusually disparaging comments about soldiers killed, wounded or captured.
The Atlantic reported in 2020 that Trump declined to visit a US military cemetery while on a presidential trip to France because it was "filled with losers."
And his former chief of staff, John Kelly, said last year that as president Trump had said he didn't want to be seen near military amputees "because 'it doesn't look good for me.'"
While running for president in 2015, he insulted the then Republican senator John McCain, who was tortured and imprisoned for nearly six years during the Vietnam war, joking he preferred "people that weren't captured."
Trump's vice presidential pick J.D. Vance addressed the controversy, saying at a campaign stop that "this is a guy that loves our veterans."
Trump was not "denigrating" veterans but "saying some nice things about a person he liked."
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