Piers Morgan stumps Trump on his transgender military ban and Viagra

(Image credit: Screenshot/BBC News)

published 5 June 2019

In an interview with Piers Morgan on Wednesday's Good Morning Britain, President Trump said "there's always a chance" of military action against Iran, walked back his assertion Tuesday that Britain's public National Health Service would be part of a U.S.-Britain trade deal, said he "wouldn't have minded" serving during the Vietnam War but has made up for sitting it out by increasing military funding as president, and parried Morgan's question about U.S. gun violence by claiming he "read an article where everybody is being stabbed" in London, and "they said your hospital is a sea of blood, all over the floors."

Morgan asked about Trump's continued sniping at Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Trump insisted he never attacks McCain and "I don't think about him," before criticizing McCain. Trump also tried to clarify his remark that Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, is "nasty." Markle "was nasty about me," Trump said. "That's okay for her to be nasty. It's not good for me to be nasty to her, and I wasn't."

When Morgan tried to square Trump's tweeted support for the LGBT community and his anti-LGBT policies, notably his ban on transgender military service members, Trump blamed drugs. He banned transgender troops "because they take massive amounts of drugs," he said, and "in the U.S. military you are not allowed to take any drugs." Morgan shot back that "the U.S. military spends a lot more money, for example, on giving Viagra to servicemen and women — well, servicemen — than it does on medical bills for transgender people," and Trump responded, "I didn't know they did that."

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Axios notes that, according to a 2017 Military Times report, the U.S. military spends at least 10 times more on Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs than on health care for transgender personnel, and gender-transition costs would be a similarly tiny slice of the military budget.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.