Trump Complains That He Couldn’t Give Himself the ‘Congressional Medal of Honor’: ‘They Wouldn’t Let Me Do It’
Former President Donald Trump complained that he couldn’t give himself the Medal of Honor, America’s highest award to recognize valor in military combat.
Trump gave a speech on Saturday at the Turning Points Action conference in Tampa, Florida, where he lashed out at his political foes for the umpteenth time while going on several long-winded tangents. In one of these off-script ramblings, Trump recalled a chapter from his presidency when he flew to Iraq on Air Force One to assess the battle against ISIS, and he spoke of how they had to dim the lights on the plane to avoid detection.
Trump went on and on about the “central casting” pilots who fly Air Force One, and then went into a dramatized retelling of how he sat with the pilot in the dark cockpit as the plane began its descent.
“I said ‘Captain, we’re pretty low.’ I don’t see any runway. I don’t see anything,” Trump said. Recalling how the plane got closer and closer to the ground, Trump kept on expressing concern that he couldn’t see the runway, and he recalled “I told my wife how brave I was.” This included an aside where he mocked MSNBC’s Brian Williams over his Iraq War story fabrication.
“Captain, what the hell is going on?” Trump claimed he said as they got increasingly low. “You wanna pull up, Captain?”
In the end, the landing went fine, so Trump said he asked “how did I do, Captain? Wasn’t I brave? I didn’t think you were gonna land.”
“In fact,” Trump went on, “as president, I wanted to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor but they wouldn’t let me do it. I’ve always wanted that, but they wouldn’t let me do it. They said that would be inappropriate.”
The Medal of Honor is awarded to servicemen in the armed forces who distinguish themselves by going beyond the call of duty and risking their own lives to advance America’s military operations.
Watch above, via CSPAN.
Correction: The headline of this post was updated with quotation marks around “Congressional Medal of Honor” to note this phrase, which is inaccurate as the medal is only called the “Medal of Honor,” was a direct quote from Trump.
