“Die, Atlantic Story! Please Just Die and go Away!”

It won’t! My Labor Day was unusually quiet and restful.

Sundays are “regeneration” days at TruthNewsNetwork. Unless D.C. is helter-skelter with scandal, riots, or impeachment, Sunday is a great day to just relax for a few hours and plan the week ahead. The Atlantic story set the World on fire when published last Thursday, and the fire will just NOT burn out! After all, it included some REAL dirt on Donald Trump! All of that ate up my Sunday.

Sunday was a church day with lunch with the Bride that included some amazing Mongolian Beef, rice, and vegetables. I LOVE carryout Chinese food! My plan was simply to bask in the one day this weekend I felt I could just skate through. I had already prepared my story for Labor Day: “Too Good to be True?” It, of course, was about the 2018 Trump trip to France that suddenly resulted in the Atlantic story last week that set the World on fire two years after the alleged atrocity happened! But, as I said, that story just will not die. I knew I was going to be forced to recharge the batteries for a follow-up story. And sure enough, today’s the day.

The Atlantic stunk up an otherwise beautiful Labor Day weekend for a lot of folks — especially President Trump — with a uniquely ugly story. Anti-Trump editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg (pictured above) claims that Donald Trump snubbed a World War One American cemetery in France because “it’s filled with losers,” and the Doughboys buried there are “suckers.” Goldberg also asserted that “Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain” on November 10, 2018. Honestly, I doubt the President would ever even say the word “disheveled!”

President Trump categorically rejected the Atlantic’s tale. He called it a “total lie. It’s fake news. It’s a disgrace.”

“I was ready to go to a ceremony,” Trump told journalists at Joint Air Base Andrews Thursday night. “But the helicopter could not fly…because it was raining about as hard as I’ve ever seen. And, on top of that, it was very, very foggy.” The Secret Service would not transport Trump by motorcade, he added, since “it was a very long drive.”

The Atlantic’s Goldberg wrote: “Neither claim was true.”

Who to believe? Goldberg or Trump?

Goldberg cites “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — all anonymous, of course: my least favorite and most incorrigible journalistic source veracity guarantee process of seeking credibility for a sketchy script.

In contrast, at least 11 named members of Trump’s Paris team to corroborate him. So does an email from an unidentified military aide. So does the weather data. Trump’s next-day agenda also discredits the Atlantic.

President Trump’s most compelling witness is former national security adviser John Bolton. Since sent packing last September 10, Bolton has become a loud but less formidable Trump critic. But, Bolton told Fox News: “I didn’t hear either of those comments or anything resembling them. I was there at the point in time that morning when it was decided that he would not go. It was an entirely weather-related decision and, I thought, the proper thing to do.”

Pages 241-242 of Bolton’s 577-page anti-Trump offering, The Room Where It Happened, published June 23, sinks the Atlantic’s foundering ship.

“The weather was bad, and Kelly and I spoke about whether to travel as planned to the Château-Thierry Belleau Wood monuments and nearby American Cemeteries, where many U.S. World War One dead were buried. Marine One’s crew was saying that bad visibility could make it imprudent to chopper to the cemetery… If a motorcade were necessary, it could take between 90 and 120 minutes each way, along roads that were not exactly freeways, posing an unacceptable risk that we could not get the President out of France quickly enough in case of an emergency. 

‘The press turned canceling-the-cemetery-visit into a story that Trump was afraid of the rain and took glee in pointing out that other world leaders traveled around during the day. Of course, none of them were the President of the United States, but the press didn’t understand that rules for U.S. Presidents are different from the rules for 190 other leaders who don’t command the world’s greatest military forces.”

Others in Trump’s Paris party echoed Bolton’s recollection.

• “The Atlantic story is not true,” First Lady Melania Trump declared. “It has become a very dangerous time when anonymous sources are believed above all else, and no one knows their motivation.”
• Former counselor to the President Johnny DeStefano said: “I was on this trip. The Atlantic bit is not true. Period.”
• “I did not hear POTUS call anyone losers when I told him about the weather,” former deputy White House chief of staff Zach Fuentes revealed to Breitbart Monday. John Kelly’s then-top aide added: “Honestly, do you think Gen. Kelly would have stood by and let ANYONE call fallen Marines losers?”
• “These are disgusting, grotesque, reprehensible lies,” wrote former deputy press secretary J. Hogan Gidley. “I was there in Paris and the President never said those things. In fact, he would never even think such vile thoughts because I know from first-hand knowledge that President Trump absolutely loves, respects, and reveres the brave men and women of the United States military.”
• “Again, this is 100 percent false,” a former personal aide to the President Jordan Karem tweeted. “I was next to POTUS for the whole day! The President was greatly disappointed when told we couldn’t fly there. He was incredibly eager to honor our Fallen Heroes.”
• “I was with the President the morning after the scheduled visit,” said staff Secretary Derek Lyons. “He was extremely disappointed that arrangements could not be made to get him to the site and that the trip had been canceled. I have worked for the President for his entire administration… I have never heard him utter a disparaging remark, of any kind, about our troops.”
• Senior adviser Stephen Miller dismissed the Atlantic hit piece as a “despicable lie.” He told the Washington Examiner: “The President deeply wanted to attend the memorial event in question and was deeply displeased by the bad weather call.”
• “The Atlantic story on Donald Trump is total BS,” said former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion — this never happened.”
• “I was with POTUS in France, with Sarah, and have been at his side throughout it all,” said assistant to the President Dan Scavino. “Complete lies by ‘anonymous sources’ that were ‘dropped’ just as he begins to campaign (and surge).’”
• Former deputy chief of staff Dan Walsh said: “I can attest to the fact that there was a bad weather call in France and that the helicopters were unable to safely make the flight. Overall, the President’s support and respect for our American troops, past and present, is unquestionable.”

An email stamped 5:59 a.m. that day, from a “United States Marine Corps Military Aide to the President,” whose name the White House redacted, reads: “Team, We are BAD WX call for today’s lift. COS Gen. Kelly, will motorcade and replace POTUS for today’s ceremony.”

With NO traffic, Château-Thierry is a roughly 90-minute drive northeast of Paris, partially along two-lane, rural roads. The congested return journey would have taken a presidential a motorcade 15-30 minutes longer. And a presidential motorcade is NOT comprised of a few cars with one leading the pack and several following. It is undoubtedly a small army because, after all, it would have been the President of the United States.

What about the truth of the Weather that day? Here’s the “official” weather report from France:

“During this time period, the ceilings (height of the base of the clouds) were extremely low during the midday hours (600-700 feet),” the Manhattan-based forecasting company reported. “Note that ceiling heights that low can be treacherous for a helicopter when flying over unfamiliar terrain. For reference, during the crash that killed Kobe Bryant earlier this year, ceilings were reported to be around 1,100 feet nearby.”

The next day, November 11, 2018, President Trump’s public schedule placed him at French President Emmanuel Macron’s noon Armistice Day Centennial Commemoration Luncheon at Élysée Palace. Given what the Atlantic calls “Trump’s seeming contempt for military service,” his alleged dismissal of America’s war dead as “losers” and “suckers,” and his purported to keeping his hair dry, President Trump could have sped to Orly Airport at 12:55 p.m., boarded Air Force One, and headed back to Joint Base Andrews.

Instead, Trump stayed in France two-and-a-half hours longer. He ventured to Suresnes American Cemetery and spoke in the rain for 10 minutes — without an umbrella.

“Each of these marble crosses and Stars of David marks the life of an American warrior — great, great warriors they are — who gave everything for family, country, God, and freedom,” the President said of the fallen there, from both world wars. “Through rain, hail, snow, mud, poisonous gas, bullets and mortar, they held the line, and pushed onward to victory…never knowing if they would ever again see their families or ever again hold their loved ones.”

Call me a southern redneck, skinhead, or even an idealist if you like. But putting all of the above in context, I think Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg thinking he was going to drop a blockbuster revelation Labor Day Weekend on a President who he despises instead dropped something in the punch bowl. And it wasn’t a bunch of cherries or a chunk of pineapple!

Now can we put this event to bed and move on to a REAL story about something truthful? Do you think Goldberg has any REAL information about that $1.5 Billion Xi Xinping gave to Hunter Biden? A story about that might bring some REAL facts to the table!