Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg opened his Thursday “exclusive,” by proclaiming that “when President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.”
Rather, Goldberg claimed, according to “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day,” “Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead.” The article continued with offensive quotes about our troops the unnamed sources attributed to Trump.
Soon after the article hit, named sources with undisputed firsthand knowledge of the visit cancelation refuted the charges. Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, calling the story “BS,” countered, “I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion — this never happened.” Outspoken Trump critic John Bolton told Bloomberg he hadn’t heard the president say any of those things.