Donald Trump declared himself a war hero while lamenting that he does not get enough credit for ordering bombings in Iran.
The president, who never served in the military and avoided the Vietnam draft due to a bone spur diagnosis, made the claim while speaking to conservative radio and Fox News host Mark Levin on Tuesday.
Trump discussed working with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to secure the release of hostages held by Palestinian militant group Hamas, praising the Israeli leader—who is currently facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) over alleged war crimes—as a “good man.”
“He’s in there fighting, they’re trying to put him in jail on top of everything else, how about that?” Trump said on Levin’s radio show Tuesday, referring to Netanyahu’s unrelated corruption trial in Israel. “He’s a war hero, because we worked together. He’s a war hero. I guess I am too.”
“Nobody cares, but I am too. I sent those planes,” he added, in reference to U.S. airstrikes targeting three Iranian nuclear facilities in June.
Trump never served in a war after receiving five deferments from the Vietnam draft, according to the New York Times. Four came while he was a college student, and a fifth was granted in 1968 following a diagnosis of bone spurs—a calcium buildup—in his heels.
Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans who served on the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, called Trump’s war hero claim “nuts.”
“You can like what he’s done. That’s fine. I hope he gets a resolution in Ukraine. But to put himself on the same level of people that have actually gone out and served this country, not claimed bone spurs, is an offense to anybody who served,” Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran, told CNN.
In 2018, The New York Times examined whether the doctor who diagnosed Trump with bone spurs, podiatrist Larry Braunstein, who died in 2007, did so as a favor to Trump’s father, Fred Trump, from whom Braunstein rented office space in a Queens building.
“I know it was a favor,” the doctor’s daughter, Elysa Braunstein, told the Times. “What he got was access to Fred Trump. If there was anything wrong in the building, my dad would call and Trump would take care of it immediately. That was the small favor that he got.”
Trump has long faced backlash for disparaging actual war heroes. In 2015, he suggested that Republican Arizona Senator John McCain was not one because: “I like people that weren’t captured.” McCain spent more than five years being tortured at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp after his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War.
He was also accused in 2018 of saying he did not want to visit a cemetery in France where American soldiers are buried because it was “filled with losers” and “suckers” who had died in combat, a claim the president has repeatedly denied. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff in his first term, said Trump did make the remarks.
In 2024, former president Joe Biden’s campaign released a video of military veterans condemning Trump for belittling war heroes while never serving himself.
“He’s a draft dodger, simple as that,” Army veteran Ed McCabe said of Trump in the clip.
Trump, who is desperately seeking a Nobel Peace Prize and claims to have ended several conflicts during his second term, has frequently tried to portray himself as a brave fighter on par with veterans.
During an August 7 ceremony handing out Purple Hearts to injured service members, Trump compared his own minor ear injury from last year’s assassination attempt in Pennsylvania to their sacrifices, saying: “It wasn’t that easy for me either.”
In June, he floated reviving the long-abolished title of “Secretary of War” for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, because “we feel like warriors.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
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