“What is Donald Trump really like?” we asked Wisconsin Congressman Derrick Van Orden, a Republican and former Navy SEAL.
“Do you want to know?” he asked.
“Yeah.” We were just curious.
The answer was something all Americans should see, and so we share it here. Be prepared to tear up – because he did. And we did too. The video is above. The transcript it below. We asked Van Orden the question during a Wisconsin Right Now podcast interview with him about wide-ranging subjects. (You can see his answer about the FISA Amendment here.)
But the most moving moment, by far, was his answer about Trump.
Van Orden:
“Our daughter died of cancer this summer (she was Sydney Marie (Van Orden) Martenis, his eldest daughter). So I finished running for Congress with a gravely ill daughter. And then she died right after I took office. She was in the process of dying. My first year in Congress is terrible. It was the worst thing ever.
The morning after my daughter’s funeral, I was sitting in my widower son’s basement and my phone rang, and it was from Florida. And I don’t have a lot of friends in Florida. Like who is calling me from Florida. I answered it and it was Donald Trump.
And, um, I put it on speaker so my wife could hear. I walked upstairs and Peggy, my cousin who helped raise me after our father abandoned us when I was an infant. And he offered his condolences and said, ‘I’m praying for you. How is Chris doing?’ That’s my daughter’s widower. I didn’t know he knew Chris’s name. ‘And I want you to know we care about you and your grandkids.’
That’s Donald Trump. No one’s going to tell you that. And I talk to people; he’s done that hundreds and thousands of times. And that phone call was not political. He knew I’d back him. That phone call was from one grieving, from one father to a grieving father, and from one grandfather to a grieving grandfather.
That’s the Donald Trump no one’s going to tell you about. They’re just not going to say it. They refuse to believe that he’s a human being, and that he’s caring, and that he loves our country. That’s Donald Trump.
And the other side of that, Jessica, he’s also the guy when Vladimir Putin said, ‘I’m going to invade Ukraine.’ You know what Donald Trump told Vladimir Putin? ‘You invade Ukraine, I’m going to bomb the Kremlin.’ Those two things can exist in the same universe. Guess what? Vladimir Putin didn’t invade Ukraine under Trump. So you can be a loving, caring human being, which Donald Trump is, and you can also tell people right to their face, ‘I will destroy you. I will destroy you if you harm an American.’
They’re completely compatible because they’re all based in love. And I know that sounds weird, but it’s true.”
