On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was speaking to a group of veterans in Virginia when he seemed to divide them into groups that were strong enough to handle the horrors of war and those that were weak.
A member of the audience asked Trump about the suicide epidemic among veterans and asked if he would push for faith-based counseling for cases of PTSD. Trump replied that he would support such measures, then went off on a bit of a tangent about those who did fall victim to PTSD.
— Donald Trump’s hotel defaced with ‘Black Lives Matter’ graffiti —
“When you talk about the mental-health problems, when people come back from war and combat, and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you’re strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can’t handle it, and they see horror stories, they see events that you couldn’t see in a movie,” Trump said, according to Politico.
The remarks are particularly damaging because Trump himself has never served. He received four draft deferments in the 1960s during the Vietnam War because he was a student and then got a medical deferment because of a foot issue in 1968.
