Re: America's Decorated Military Heroes See Trump As An Insane, Draft Dodging Coward Who Has No Right To Be Commander-in-Chief

[Bucko]

DoD wrote

> When Americans look at President Donald Trump, They see a pot-bellied,
> 71- year-old man with a doughy frame. But in 1968, when he was a
> 22-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate, Trump was a tall, fit
> athlete who played football, tennis, and golf. His age and clean medical
> history qualified Trump as a perfect candidate for the draft to serve in
> the United States Army and fight in the Vietnam War, but he avoided
> combat after receiving a 1-Y medical deferment, which he has said was
> due to "bone spurs in his heels." More than half a million American men
> were stationed in Vietnam by the end of that year, which was the
> bloodiest 12 months of the conflict. On the day of Trump's graduation
> from the University of Pennsylvania, 40 Americans were killed in
> Vietnam, according to The New York Times.
>
> The son of Fred Trump, a wealthy New York real estate developer, Donald
> Trump did what many other wealthy young men were allowed to do: He
> dodged the draft. Between 1964 and 1972, a few months before the draft
> ended, he received five deferments — in addition to his "bone spurs"
> claim, the other four were based on his educational status. He received
> two deferments while he attended Fordham University from 1964 to 1966,
> and two more after transferring to the Wharton School at the University
> of Pennsylvania.
>
> s a draft dodger, Trump never knew the horrors of war, but in 1997, he
> laughed when telling radio host Howard Stern that avoiding sexually
> transmitted diseases was like his "personal Vietnam." "It is a dangerous
> world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam
> era,” Trump said to Stern, discussing his sex life. "I feel like a great
> and very brave soldier.”
>
> Today, Trump struggles to recall the most basic facts about the medical
> condition that was the basis for his final deferment. He doesn't
> remember the name of the doctor who provided him with the note of proof
> and has repeatedly failed to provide a copy of it to The New York Times.
> He's also forgotten which of his heels had the spurs, now just claiming
> it was both. (During the 2016 presidential election, the affliction
> wasn't noted by Dr. Harold Bornstein, a physician who performed a
> physical on Trump and found that he had "no significant medical
> problems." in his medical history)
>
>
>
>
>
> Unlike the 2,709,918 soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Trump never served.
> He wasn't injured like the 304,000 Americans who fought in the war, or
> among the more than 58,000 killed in combat. Despite this inexperience,
> he is now in charge of the U.S. armed forces, the Army, the Navy, the
> Air Force, the Coast Guard, and the Marine Corps as commander-in-chief.
> As president, he is tasked with dictating to all military generals and
> admirals which battles should be fought, where they should be fought,
> and who gets to fight in them on behalf of the United States.
> He is certainly not the first American leader to receive draft
> deferments. Former vice president Joe Biden received five student
> deferments, former VP Dick Cheney received five deferments, and former
> president Bill Clinton received deferments and even penned a letter to
> an ROTC officer thanking him for "saving me from the draft." (It should
> also be noted that before Clinton's administration, LGBTQ servicemen and
> women were banned from serving. In his time, the military's "don't ask,
> don't tell" policy began, which forced them to conceal their identities
> or risk being discharged, effectively condoning discrimination.) This
> column will afford these men no absolution for their decisions, but what
> makes Trump's behavior obscene is that despite having never served, he
> has fashioned himself as the arbiter of military courage.
>
> It was Trump who, as a presidential candidate in July 2015, dissed
> Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war for roughly five and a
> half years during Vietnam, by stating, "I like people who weren't
> captured." He publicly disrespected Khizr Muazzam Khan and Ghazala Khan,
> the gold-star Pakistani-American parents of Army captain Humayun Khan,
> who was killed in combat in 2004 and posthumously awarded a Purple Heart
> for his bravery. Not only did Trump attack an immigrant family who made
> a sacrifice for their adopted nation, but he even compared their loss to
> the "sacrifices" he made while becoming a real estate tycoon. To insult
> the family of Khan, who died at war at 27 — just two years older than
> Trump was when he received his 4-F classification, permanently
> disqualifying him from military service — by comparing it to his own
> business ventures is a claim only made equatable in the mind of a man
> with little recognition of his own internalized cowardice.
>
> Now the president, the five-time draft dodger, is weakening the military
> to satisfy his own bigotry.
>
>
>
> On July 26, he announced via Twitter that transgender soldiers would no
> longer be allowed to fight for their country, essentially promising to
> ban transgender people from serving. Reneging on a past campaign promise
> to support the LGBTQ community, he announced that he will reinstate a
> ban that was lifted by the Obama administration just a year prior,
> citing "military costs and disruption that transgender in the military
> would entail."
>
>
>
>
>
> In one fell swoop, an estimated 15,000 active-duty, guard, and reserve
> American transgender soldiers were informed by their commander-in-chief
> that their nation didn't want their service — though the military said
> it will not act on Trump's tweet until a formal order is put in place.
> The "military costs" Trump referenced — which would, according to an
> estimate, range between $2.4 and $8.4 million per year for gender
> affirmation–related health care — are, at their uppermost limit, a tenth
> of amount the military spends each year to treat erectile dysfunction,
> including the cost of Viagra prescriptions.
>
>
>
>
> Trump's administration has also made attacks on immigrant soldiers, too,
> most recently threatening to end the Military Accessions Vital to
> National Interest recruitment program, which started in 2009 and has
> since enlisted 10,000 recruits. Recruiting children of immigrants is one
> of America's largest military strategies, and the program was
> established to allow certain immigrants to receive fast-tracked
> citizenship in exchange for their much-needed medical and language
> abilities. But now the Pentagon has proposed doing away with the
> program, which would in turn cancel 1,000 enlistment contracts. The
> recruits would then be immediately at risk for deportation once the
> program formally ends — a result of Trump's immigration policy.
>
> It's crucial to ponder what effect this behavior may have on the
> mentality of those who are tasked with defending a nation that's being
> led by a man who has explicitly propagated ideologies to strip them of
> their ability to serve. How do you focus on the task at hand when you're
> concerned your family will be forcibly removed from the country in your
> absence? How do you concentrate when your employer represents a nation
> you're fighting for but still denies your civil rights? As global
> hostilities rise and new threats emerge, America is weakened not by the
> gender identity of its soldiers or their birthplace, but by the coward
> in the Oval Office who accepted five deferments to avoid fighting for
> his country, then lived to brag about it.
>
>

Wasn't Trump a draft dodger?

[Bucko]