Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday downplayed injuries suffered by more than 100 U.S. troops during a 2020 Iranian airstrike on a U.S. base in Iraq.

Trump dismissed the traumatic brain injuries as “headaches,” repeating a view he first expressed shortly after the attack.

The ballistic missile strike was in retaliation for the United States killing Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike.

During a news conference in Milwaukee on Tuesday — the same day Iran launched missiles at Israel — Trump was asked if he thought he should’ve been tougher with Iran after the 2020 attack.

“So, first of all — injured. What does ‘injured’ mean?” Trump responded. “Injured means, you mean, because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort.

"There was nobody hurt, other than the sound was loud," he continued. "And some people said that hurt, and I accept that."

According to the Pentagon, 109 service members were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries following the strike. 

In an interview early Wednesday morning with CNN, Mark Esper, Trump’s defense secretary at the time of the attack, said the former president’s comments were “obviously not accurate.”

Esper explained that there initially appeared to be “no injuries, traditionally.” But he said over time, troops began to report symptoms.

“It took some time to discover these, again,” Esper said. “Eventually, over 100 troops reported injuries. Some of them were very serious.”

Trump also attacked the reporter who asked the question Tuesday, accusing her of not being “truthful.”

And the former president called Iran’s decision to warn U.S. officials ahead of the strike and not to attempt a more severe attack — which he said was done to avoid escalation — “a very nice thing.”

Trump insisted he was very tough on Iran as president, arguing the American adversary did not have money to finance proxy militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah then.

Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 agreement with Iran aimed at preventing it from developing a nuclear bomb. He vowed to negotiate and replace it with a better deal, but one never materialized.

On Tuesday, Trump claimed without evidence that if he had won reelection in 2020, he would have reached a new pact with Iran within the week. 

Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesperson for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, said in a statement that Trump’s latest comments about the 2020 missile strike “insulted injured service members,” adding, “He is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.”

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, referenced Trump’s comments four years ago in the wake of the attack. Walz seemed unaware Trump had doubled down on the remarks just hours earlier.

In arguing that he believes Trump lacks “steady leadership” on the world stage, Walz said, “When Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches.”

Trump’s downplaying of the service members’ injuries is the latest in a series of comments he’s made that Democrats have said are disrespectful to the military.

Others include:

• In August, the former president argued the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, is better than the Medal of Honor, the top military award, because those who receive the Medal of Honor tend to be “in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”
  
  
• Also in August, Trump campaign officials reportedly got into an altercation with staff at Arlington National Cemetery when the campaign was told it could not take photos in an area where recent U.S. casualties are buried. Trump was at Arlington to pay his respects to service members killed in the 2021 suicide bombing outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.
  
  
• Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly has said Trump in private called service members who were wounded or killed in combat “losers” and “suckers.” Trump has denied making those comments.
  
  
• In 2015, Trump said the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was a prisoner of war for more than five years in North Vietnam, was “not a war hero,” adding, “I like people who were not captured."