Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) said President Donald Trump views servicemembers as “toys” and props to show off strength.
Partial transcript as follows:
GALLEGO: Well, I’m glad they’re resolving their problems now, but where was the leadership for so long that it got to this point? And I think later on, he says, like, this is a problem of a long ago. I was just speaking to a spouse just about three days ago, and this is the current problems right now.
And then it really goes to the deep, deep, deep problem here is that this administration did not plan for this war. They did not plan how to get out of this war, did not really understand how this war was going to escalate. They were basically trying and hoping that this war would end up just like the war in Venezuela. And our men and women are now suffering the consequences of that.
There’s a deep, deep, deep mistrust of this leadership. The secretary of defense is absolutely not qualified to be leading the Department of Defense. And certainly, the president has shown that he just doesn’t really care about the troops.
His lack of — lackadaisical attitude about men and women and their deployments, you know, just kind of reflects what he actually thinks about them. He thinks about them more as toys and as ways to basically show off or show its strength, but not the fact that they truly, at the end of the day, are humans. They’re Americans. And they have families, and these things, these deployments, these wars have consequences.
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