Analysis McCain hits Trump where it hurts, attacking bone spur deferments in Vietnam
After a week in which President Trump endured not-so-veiled criticisms from his two predecessors as president and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), McCain delivered another broadside that seems clearly aimed at Trump in the most personal terms yet.
McCain, whose status as a war hero Trump publicly and controversially doubted as a 2016 presidential candidate, appeared to retaliate in kind against the president in a C-SPAN interview about the Vietnam War airing Sunday night. In the interview, McCain pointed to wealthy Americans who were able to get out of being drafted into service in the conflict in which he spent years as a prisoner of war. And he pointed to a very specific type of deferment which Trump just happened to use.
One aspect of the conflict, by the way, that I will never ever countenance is that we drafted the lowest-income level of America, and the highest-income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur, McCain said. That is wrong. That is wrong. If we are going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve.
Trump received five deferments during Vietnam: four for his studies in college, and one for you guessed it bone spurs in his heel. As The Washington Post reported in July 2
For the previous four years, Trump had avoided the draft and the possibility of being sent to fight in the Vietnam War by obtaining four separate deferments so he could study at Fordham University and the University of Pennsylvania. With his diploma in hand and his college days over, he was suddenly vulnerable to conscription.
Trumps exposure to the draft, however, didnt last long. Two months later, on Sept. 17, 1968, he reported for an armed forces physical examination and was medically disqualified, according to the ledger from his local Selective Service System draft board in Jamaica, N.Y., now in the custody of the National Archives.
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