MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell mocked Donald Trump for saying he feels like a warrior by referencing the last-minute medical diagnosis that kept him out of the Vietnam War.
Speaking at a NATO summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump floated bringing back the title “Secretary of War”—a Cabinet position abolished in 1947—for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “for a couple of weeks” because “we feel like warriors.” He spoke in the same speech about his operation to bomb three nuclear facilities in Iran, insisting the targets had been “obliterated” after a leaked report from his own intelligence community suggesting the strikes had a more limited impact.
“Of course Donald Trump feels like a warrior,” O’Donnell said on The Last Word on Wednesday night. “Donald Trump, who evaded military service during the Vietnam War because he claimed his foot hurt—the same foot on which he spent the rest of his life playing endless miles of golf, and never limping.”
Trump had five deferments during the draft in the 1960s—four of which were for education, according to the New York Times. When he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1968, he became eligible for the draft. But he was ultimately exempted from military service for a fifth time in the fall on medical grounds after being diagnosed with bone spurs—a buildup of calcium on the bone—in his heels.
In 2018, the daughters of a podiatrist in Queens who rented his office from Trump’s father, Fred Trump, claimed their late dad had made the diagnosis as a “favor” to Trump Sr. Donald Trump had previously said a doctor gave him a “very strong letter” about the bone spurs, which he in turn gave to draft officials, but said he couldn’t remember the doctor’s name and failed to provide documentation to the Times relating to the exemption.
“There is no reason to believe that Donald Trump wasn’t perfectly healthy enough to serve in the military during the war of his youth,” O’Donnell said. “But like most men who were eligible to serve in the Vietnam War at that time, Donald Trump was terrified of being sent to the jungles of Vietnam and becoming another statistic in the American military body count that was far greater than all of the wars—the American wars of the 21st century—combined.”
“And so Donald Trump, who only had to choose which ridiculous hat to wear when he went to the Situation Room to be a spectator during his war in Iran, now feels like a warrior,” O’Donnell went on. “The war that Donald Trump experienced in that air-conditioned room, where he didn’t even have to loosen his necktie, makes Donald Trump feel like a warrior. The biggest crybaby in the history of American politics now feels like a warrior. The man who spent every single day of his political and presidential life complaining that he is being treated unfairly now feels like a warrior.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
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