For the second time in two weeks, Snopes.com, the fact-checking site, validated Donald Trump and his claims that President Joe Biden and others had lied about him when they attributed disgusting comments to him, most recently, the claim that Trump called fallen World War I soldiers “suckers and losers.”
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Snopes posted their review of the charge June 27, which ran in part:
Following a story by The Atlantic, a number of reputable news outlets reported on the alleged comments in 2020, relying entirely on anonymous sources from his administration.
However, there appeared to be no evidence of an audio or video recording of the remarks in question, nor was there any documentation, such as transcripts or presidential notes, to independently confirm or deny the alleged quotes’ authenticity. Moreover, since Snopes did not witness the in-question comments firsthand, we can’t say for certain whether Trump called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.”
Biden rebooted the charge during the presidential debate Thursday with this exchange, where he invoked the memory of his son Beau, who deployed as an Army lawyer to Camp Victory with the Delaware National Guard.
BIDEN: I was recently in – in – in France for D-Day, and I spoke to all – about those heroes that died. I went to the World War II cemetery – World War I cemetery he refused to go to. He was standing with his four-star general, and he told him – he said, I don’t want to go in there because they’re a bunch of losers and suckers.
My son was not a loser. He was not a sucker. You’re the sucker. You’re the loser.
TAPPER: President Trump?
TRUMP: First of all, that was a made-up quote, suckers and losers. They made it up. It was in a third-rate magazine that’s failing, like many of these magazines. He made that up. He put it in commercials. We’ve notified them. We had 19 people that said I didn’t say it.
And think of this, who would say – I’m at a cemetery, or I’m talking about our veterans – because nobody’s taken better care – I’m so glad this came up, and he brought it up. There’s nobody that’s taken better care of our soldiers than I have. To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say suckers and losers.
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(Side note: I once saw Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III as I left the dining facility near Al-Faw Palace, the Iraq theater operations hub at Camp Victory. Later in my tour, I hitched a ride on a convoy with Delaware National Guardsmen, and they all told me the captain was a great guy.)
Snopes.com has more than 50 articles about Trump, but this one comes on the heels of the site’s June 21 surprise post: “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People,'” which my RedState colleague Sister Toldjah noted in her piece: “Really, Snopes?“
It is significant that Snopes.com backed up Trump, given its stature as the granddaddy of fact-checking sites, founded in 1994 by David Mikkelson and his wife Barbara as a site that debunked urban legends.
In 2016, the Mikkelsons divorced, and Barbara sold her share to Proper Media, the online advertising firm for Snopes.com.
Proper Media’s owners, Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup, acquired the remaining 50 percent in 2022. The two men also bought Salon.com in 2019.