Trump Dismisses Brain Injuries Suffered by U.S. Troops After 2020 Iranian Missile Attack

GOP nominee Donald Trump drew the ire of some military members earlier this week when he dismissed injuries that U.S. troops sustained during an Iranian missile attack on an air base in Iraq in 2020.

While taking questions from reporters as part of a campaign stop in Milwaukee on Tuesday, one journalist asked him whether he should’ve initiated a stronger response to Iran after the country launched missiles at U.S. military personnel who were stationed at the base. Dozens of troops suffered traumatic brain injuries as a result of that atack.

Trump responded:

“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.

“So, just so you understand, there was nobody ever tougher on Iraq. When you say not tough, they had no money. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for Hezbollah. And when we hit them, they hit us. And they called us and they said, ‘We’re going to shoot at your fort but we’re not going to hit it.’”

Trump, of course, misspoke and said Iraq instead of Iran.

He then lashed out at the reporter, calling him not truthful for not reporting that the missiles that Iran launched didn’t strike the fort at all. Trump added:

“There was nobody hurt other than the sound was loud and some people said that hurt, and I accept that.”

Officials with the Department of Defense said that more than 100 service members suffered traumatic brain injuries as a result of the strike that happened in January of 2020.

The missile strike by Iran was done in retaliation to Trump ordering a drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, a general in Iran, early in 2020.

What Trump said this week about the military personnel’s injuries are actually in line with what he said in the past about them as well. Not long after the attacks happened, Trump said he had “heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things.”

Tuesday’s stop in Milwaukee was part of a statewide sweep his campaign took in Wisconsin earlier this week. He spent much of the time in the critical swing state hammering the foreign policy set forth by the Biden administration, which is timely considering Iran recently launched missile attacks against Israel as a retaliation for the country’s attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah — most recently in Lebanon.

Trump has consistently said that there was “nobody ever tougher on Iran” than he was when he was in the White House.

During the Trump administration, the U.S. withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, reimposing many sanctions on the country. He has said consistently since then that he was able to keep Iran’s government poor with no money to fund terrorist organizations like they’ve been able to do during the Biden administration.