November 18, 2018

Trump Just Lashed Out at a Former Navy SEAL for Not Catching Osama Bin Laden Sooner

The president slammed his critic as a “Hillary Clinton backer.”

President Donald Trump speaks during a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony White House Friday.Cheriss May/NurPhoto via ZUMA

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President Donald Trump dismissed criticism from the retired four-star admiral and former Navy SEAL who led the raid that took out Osama bin Laden in 2011 in a new interview on “Fox News Sunday.” And he did so in a typically Trump fashion: by attacking him. “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we had gotten Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that?” Trump said.

Trump lashed out at the decorated admiral, William McRaven, after Fox’s Chris Wallace noted McRaven’s criticisms of Trump’s anti-press rhetoric, shortly after the president took office in 2017. “We must challenge this statement and this sentiment that the news media is the enemy of the American people,” McRaven said at the time. “This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”

Wallace raised McRaven’s comments in a televised back-and-forth with Trump who, nearly two years later, has only increased his antagonism towards the press. In response, Trump dismissed McRaven as a “Hillary Clinton backer and an Obama backer.” Then he went for the gut-punch by attacking McRaven’s military accomplishments. Watch below:

McRaven continued to criticize Trump after his comments in 2017. In August, when Trump revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, McRaven wrote a blistering open letter to Trump in the Washington Post in which he accused the president of using “McCarthy-era tactics” to “suppress the voices of criticism.” A few days later, he resigned from a Pentagon technology advisory board.

Also in the Fox News interview that aired Sunday morning, Trump denied knowing about Matt Whitaker’s anti-Mueller comments before promoting him to Acting Attorney General. Read more about that here.

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And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

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In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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