Rick Blasts Donald Trump’s Dishonorable Campaign Stunt
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Any conservative America United States of America Good night and good luck Hey folks it's Rick I am traveling today so I'm not going to be as loud and bold as I normally am in terms of the delivery but I am presently in the Atlanta airport in the Delta Crown Room which is the only thing that allows human beings to survive air travel

But I want to talk about the elephant in the room this week, and it's a big one. And it's one that every American should take very seriously, and that every American should consider how they feel about a person who would use the honored graves of our military dead for a political stunt. That's the elephant in the room. Let's get to it. As all of you know by now, Donald Trump this week went to the Arlington National Cemetery, and specifically he went to a section called Section 60.

In Section 60, many American heroes are buried, particularly American heroes who gave their lives in the war on terror. Men and women who were killed in Iraq, men and women who were killed in Afghanistan, men and women who were killed in Syria. And it is a place of enormous emotional import. I have been there. If you have never been there, it is something I suggest you do with the reverence and the seriousness and the respect it deserves.

Because those are young men and young women, for the most part, who were cut down in the prime of life defending this country, serving this country, who gave us an example of sacrifice and courage and selflessness that is often missing in this society. And as much as I want to tell you that what happened can be forgiven, they can't. And I've been talking to a lot of my veteran friends in the last 24 to 48 hours about this.

And it is the most outrageous, most egregious, most revolting thing in a catalog of things that we've said about Donald Trump over the years that tells you exactly how he really feels about our veterans. He's the guy who mocked John McCain. He's not a war hero. He's a war hero. He's a war hero. Five and a half years. He's a war hero because he was captured.

I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you. He's the guy who calls our troops suckers and losers. The Atlantic Magazine reporting tonight that back in 2018, President Trump called fallen U.S. soldiers losers and suckers for getting killed in action. The article citing four people with firsthand knowledge of the situation, and tonight both the AP and Washington Post confirming the story. He's the man who was afraid to go and lay a wreath in France.

to honor World War I veterans who died in France in enormous numbers because the rain would mess up his hair. And so the suckers and losers under the ground in that cemetery in France never had a president named Donald Trump visit them. Donald Trump had never been to Arlington since his presidency ended until this week. He did it for a political stunt, for a political prank, and it's reprehensible.

Now, I want to talk to you about what the idea was, because we now have some reporting on it. The idea was to stage a fake memorial ceremony with the agreement or connivance or cooperation. I don't know what happened with the family, so I'm not going to fully characterize it. But their objective was to say, in an advertisement, in a TV ad,

Donald Trump came to honor the dead, the 13 who lost their lives in the evacuation of Kabul in Afghanistan. They were going to try to hang this around the neck of Vice President Harris. That was their objective. Now, a staffer, a funeral specialist, a memorial specialist at Arlington, and by the way, those are folks who take this seriously.

Epic responsibility to maintain the honor and dignity of our of our dead very seriously a woman Army employee of Arlington said to the Trump team with his piss and camera crew the social media people You can't do this. This is not allowed you are not allowed to pose and posture and use this sacred ground for your campaign and

What did she get? A physical altercation with the Trump team, with the Trump staff. A physical altercation. Some reports say she was knocked to the ground. Some reports say she was knocked over and pushed aside. We don't know yet. I'm hoping we'll get some video on this at some point soon.

Now, we don't know who the Trump staffers were, but I will find out. I assure you there will be a way we will find out. I know that the Senator on Services Committee is already asking Arlington to identify the people that did this for Donald Trump on his behalf. Why didn't he do it? I'll tell you why. He's desperate.

He is desperate. His campaign is falling apart. He's falling apart mentally and physically. And he was looking for anything to change the narrative, anything to change the game that he's been losing and losing and losing and losing in the past few weeks. So he chose sacred ground. He chose to dance on the tombs of American soldiers. Now look, Donald Trump, we all know this, is very clear about this.

His contempt for our troops and our soldiers is boundless. He thinks of them as suckers and losers. He thinks of them as people who only join the military because they're poor. He has said things behind closed doors. He's said things in public that are disqualifying.

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Venice, I want that. I'm here for Venice. Yes, Bogota. No, folks, and I hope this doesn't get interrupted again. We're going to leave that in the tape, honestly, because it's kind of funny. It kind of breaks the grimness here.

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And you've got to ask yourself, what kind of moral vacuum is inside somebody that they'll do that? What kind of emptiness is inside somebody that'll do that? And I want to ask the parents of every troop, every soldier out there working right now and putting themselves in harm's way every day. You don't want your kid to ever pass in surveillance. You don't want them to die. But too many have had to have that experience over the years. It's one of the most...

One of the most difficult things that the military faces is that almost everyone who dies in combat is a young person. Many of them are practically children. And for Donald Trump to insult and demean them like this because of his desperation to win, it's disqualifying. It's disgusting. It's demeaning. None of it is acceptable. Now, look, I tweeted about this earlier today,

In a world where Donald Trump had a shred, a scintilla, the tiniest iota of moral and personal integrity, three things would happen. One, he would announce immediately that they were destroying the footage and would never use it again. Instead, they've been using the footage in advertising. They've been using the footage on social media. They've been using the footage to raise money.

So that would be number one. He should immediately say, I will not use this footage. We will destroy this footage. Simple. Number two, he should apologize. Some of the people that were with him were military families, and I'll grant you that, but they were standing on the graves of people who were not their sons, not their daughters.

because they wanted to make sure the photo looked right for Donald Trump. They wanted to make sure the picture was right for Donald Trump. It's unacceptable. It's wildly unacceptable. He needs to issue a personal apology to those families whose graves his photo op besmirched. There is nothing acceptable, nothing acceptable about that at all, ever. Number three, the Trump staffers need to be fired.

Every staffer involved needs to be fired. Every single one of them. I don't care if it's a cameraman or if it's an advanced guy or if it was Jason Miller or Steven Chung or whoever was there, they need to be fired. And they need to be named when they're fired. We have fired the following. Because those people are following Donald Trump's orders. Those people are more loyal to Donald Trump than Donald Trump ever was to an American soldier.

Those people are more loyal to Donald Trump than he deserves. And finally, and again, in a just world where Donald Trump had ethics, morality, integrity, honor, I know those words are completely alien to him. He would also tell his people, his followers, his acolytes, his consultants, his neighbors, the elected officials that are currently defending this outrage, he would tell them, "Shut up. Stop it. I was wrong.

I hurt the families of those people. I hurt this country by doing this. I hurt the long tradition that Arlington National Cemetery is not a partisan stage for a photo op. It's not the moment where a desperate campaigner gets to go and stand on the grass that covers the last remains of American heroes.

Give me a second, folks, because I am upset. I'm upset. I'm angry. I'm upset about it. And you've got Chris LaCivita right now out there bragging. I hope the Secretary of the Army says something. They're trying to trigger them. He literally said it in a tweet. Chris LaCivita is a combat veteran, honorably served, and yet he is serving now a dishonorable man. He is serving now someone who Chris LaCivita's brothers in arms who may have died, may be in Section 60.

He is now by extension joined in this horrifying abuse of these folks and their families. It's horrifying. You should not accept it, people. Now, look, we understand a lot of this is coming now from the new Lewandowski regime inside Trump. Well, we understand this is Corey driving this train. He is telling Trump now to do things like this. It's about what we expected would happen. And Corey is an abuser.

He previously physically abused and manhandled a reporter. He has a terrible reputation in this regard. You can Google it. You can find out more. It's not a difficult thing to search for. But it's as if their desperation manifested in these two weak and sad men who are his lead defenders on this abuse. They will not stop.

They will continue. They're going to out, I promise you guys, I promise you probably by tonight, they're going to out the identity of the worker who tried to stop them. She didn't want to file charges. And what she told in the official on the report was she was afraid to file charges because she didn't want to be threatened with violence or exposed to violence by Trump supporters. That's their world. That's their world.

They are terrifyingly shitty people. They are terrible, terrible people. Their behavior tells you everything you need to know. And the fact that people are afraid to confront them because of the threat of violence is dark and unacceptable. What Trump wanted to do there was illegal. It is literally illegal. What Trump wanted to do there was inappropriate. It's evidently inappropriate. What Trump wanted to do there was immoral. And those things are all unsurprising from Donald Trump.

But when people tell you that the guardrails will hold and the systems will protect us and the rule of law is strong, when you have a person who is probably like a GS-13, she's not a gun. I promise you. I don't know who the Arlington worker was. I promise you. She didn't work there for the money. She works there because she loves her country. She works there because she cares about the men and women in that soil and threatened her.

And her instantly jumping to the fact that she could be putting her life in danger. She could be putting herself and her family in physical danger because she stood up to do the right thing while Donald Trump and his enablers demand to do the wrong thing. It should tell you very crisply where the moral boundaries of this world lie. It should tell you very cleanly where the moral boundaries of this campaign lie. You know, I can tell you something. There's no chance in hell, never in a billion years,

Would Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do a photo op, a film shoot, an ad content creation event in a military cemetery? They would never do it. It's incomprehensible. And even for you MAGAs listening to this and watching this right now, you know it too. You know it too. You know the truth. You know they wouldn't. The defense of Trump is automatic in Magalhóla now. It switches off some moral center in the minds of his supporters.

And it switches off a moral center also in the minds of his elected officials. It switches it off in the minds of his enablers and consultants. They don't understand why this is a problem. They don't understand why this is a central part of the fight we have ahead of us. This is a man who holds the lives, the blood, and the bodies of those young men and women in that field at Section 60.

as cheap. He does nothing. He holds them in disrespect and disregard at a level that is utterly disqualifying for president. No president, none in our history has ever, has ever looked in the eyes of the people that he consented to die as commander-in-chief and thought, "That's a sucker. That's a loser. That's some poor stupid person who couldn't get a job anywhere else." And these are all things Trump has said.

No American president before would have looked at a man like John McCain and insulted not only his military service, but the sacrifice he made for this country by holding firm for five and a half years in the Hanoi Haltzong. No other commander-in-chief, again, a commander-in-chief has to know that he is going to someday have to send men and women into harm's way and that their lives could be ended

on his order. Every president has understood that. Every president has cared about that. Every president has given a damn about these young men and women. They learn their stories. They learn about their families. They understand who they're at the top of the military chain of command representing and directing. They get it.

And I mean that, when I say that, I mean George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Joe Trouble Walker Bush and Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter go through the whole list. They all got it. And the folks who are supporting this outrage in Donald Trump's world, this outrage to say this failing campaign, a lot of them do get it, but they'll never say anything. A lot of them do get it, but they're afraid of him, just like that, what good all ends it.

A lot of them do get it, but they're afraid he'll someday say something nasty about them or run the primary against them or hurt them in some way. You know, this has been a pretty grim elephant in the room. And I, I, I, it's because I feel pretty, my heart is heavy about this story. My heart is heavy for the family. I, one person tweeted yesterday, he said, you know, I realized something. He said,

He says, I was thinking to myself, maybe this isn't such a big deal. And then he said, I realized then one of the women in the photo op was standing on my buddy's grave who died next to me in Iraq. These are real people. Their lives are real. Their lives are lost and the contempt is boundless for them. I want to say one more thing in that same section. There's a young man, captain, army captain who died there. His name is Humian Khan. And in the 2016 election, Humian Khan, his parents died.

It said they opposed Trump, I'm sorry, 2020, because of the Muslim ban. It broke their hearts because their son, a devout Muslim, put on the uniform of this country, went into combat, served and fought bravely and honorably every day until the day of bulletproof his life. If Donald Trump laughed and joked about Humean Khan and the gold star and his gold star parents, look, I don't expect to change any MAGA minds anymore. I know who you are. You know who you are.

You're sunk, you're gone, you're out. You've abandoned the world where rationality and honor and integrity and patriotism matter. All that matters to you is him. We get it. We understand it. But the elephant in the room is that your souls are forfeit when it comes down to this, guys. You've got to understand that this is something at a level that these...

These ferocious angels who look down on us now will never accept. Gotta go. Good night and good luck.