The implication in this piece is that Trump's dad cut a deal with a podiatrist: Lower rent and better service in exchange for being Donnie's weatherstripping (keeping him out of the draft) during Vietnam.
I have mixed feelings about the article.
First, I am glad, in that every Republican who bleated about Bill Clinton being a draft dodger and who now closes their eyes to Trump's having dodged the draft has to know, in the depths of their souls, that they are nothing but hypocrites (not that they've ever called out the draft-dodging of Dan Quayle, John Bolton, John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, Gorge W. Bush, Mitt Romney, El Rushbo, Mike Huckabee, etc.).
Second, anyone who is not a Trumpanzee and who has a functioning cortex knows that Trump is, essentially, a loud-mouthed coward.
Third, anyone who was alive and at least into their early teens in the late 1960s knows that in the non-poor socioeconomic classes, draft-dodging was accepted, if not expected. By the middle of 1968, it was clear that the Vietnam War was a lost cause. All presidential candidates campaigned on ending the war. Nobody wanted to be one of the 25,000 who ended up being killed while Nixon and Kissinger fiddle-fucked around. If your family had the connections to get you into the National Guard, that worked. If not, there was college or other things to get deferments, including getting a sympathetic doctor to write a fib of a letter justifying an exemption.
If Trump had served, his daddy would have probably gotten him into a commissioning program and then we'd have heard no more of him.
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3 comments:
As one of the lucky ones who served in country, it has never bothered me if someone didn't go and used all their deferment options. Well okay it bothered me some. The thing that bothered me most was those who didn't go and grabbed every way they could to avoid going and then acted like they were some kind of gung ho, let's get them an and by that I mean you not me, and didn't just shut up annoyed me a lot. The head of the young americans for freedom group at the university I attended after returning home was one such creep. Parents had friends who got him into national guard. Boy howdy did he want the rest of us get down and dirty, cause those commies were coming here next. Fucking jerks. Anyway end of rant.
It's probably best for the military that he didn't have much contact with it until now.
-Doug in Oakland
I saw this post by these daughters of a doctor, and was not surprised. The only thing I do find troublesome is that even though Nixon and Kissinger took a long time to get us out of Vietnam, the war was a Democrat led initiative, first started by JFK, who probably would not have escalated it, and then continued and expanded into the huge clusterf**k it became under LBJ.
I was around when Nixon was pretty much eviscerated by the press for first escalating the war himself, and then for the dishonorable appearance of his Peace with Honor method of withdrawal from the war, which allowed the systematic murder of huge numbers of South Vietnamese and others in the area by the Khmer Rouge. Laos and Cambodia were also victims of this genocide. Pol Pot was a brilliant tactician but a murderous piece of human garbage.
Thank you, Mike R, for your service.
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