President Donald Trump continues to push back against a story in The Atlantic that claimed he called U.S. service members killed in World War I "losers" and "suckers."
"Only an animal would say things like that," Trump said Monday at the White House.
"The story is a hoax, written by a guy who's got a tremendously bad history," Trump said. "The magazine itself, which I don't read, I hear is totally anti-Trump.
"He made up the story; it's a totally made-up story."
The president then went on to talk about his strained relationship with the late Arizona Sen. John McCain.
"I've always been on the opposite side of John McCain. John McCain liked wars — I will be a better warrior than anybody, but when we fight a war, we're going to win them," Trump said. "And frankly I was never a fan of John McCain, you know that, it's been very obvious."
"So, this is not something where I'm supposed to say 'What a wonderful guy.' So, you know what, I lived with him, he lived with me, but we had different philosophies," Trump said. "I respect a lot of people, that doesn't mean I necessarily have to agree with them, and I didn't agree with him on a lot of things."
But Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin is backing up her own reporting, which corroborates the claim from The Atlantic that the president insulted soldiers who died and were buried in Paris. She said her sources maintain the president would regularly call four-star generals "dopes," "babies," and "losers."
Griffin mentioned two of her sources are former senior administration officials who took the trip to Paris with Trump. Those sources said while they did not hear the president call veterans losers at the cemetery, they did hear him calling Vietnam War veterans "suckers."
"According to this source, the president would often say about American veterans: 'What's in it for them? They don't make any money,'" Griffin went on. "The source said it was a character flaw of the president, he could not understand why someone would die for their country — not worth it to him."
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