Donald Trump’s Military Cowardice Goes Beyond His 5 Draft Deferrals

NOTE:  As we get further and further into discussions of patriotism, the flag, military service, what’s sacred, etc., a look back at the history of the person who started this situation, President Trump, seemed like something we should do.)

The following column by Lincoln Anthony Blades was posted on the Teen Vogue website August 3, 2017:

When I look at President Donald Trump, I 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.

As 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 studentdeferments, 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 fashionedhimself 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.

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