The battle of words between President Trump and Senator John McCain continued Sunday with McCain backhandedly calling Trump a draft dodger.
During an interview with CSpan, McCain took a shot at Trump while speaking about the Vietnam war:
TONIGHT – @SenJohnMcCain talks about the Vietnam War's legacy on C-SPAN, at 6 & 10pm ET. pic.twitter.com/WnZT0n8Mcn
— American History TV (@cspanhistory) October 22, 2017
“One aspect of the conflict, by the way, that I will never, ever countenance is that we drafted the lowest income level of America and the highest level would get a doctor to say they had a bone spur,” McCain said.
“That is wrong. That is wrong. If we are going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve,” McCain added.
The reference was clear, as Trump received a deferment in the Fall of 1968, being diagnosed with a bone spur in the heel of his foot.
Trump previously received four other deferments during the war because he was in college.
McCain, as is well documented, served on dozens of air missions over Vietnam and was shot down over Hanoi, then held in North Vietnamese prisons until March 1973.
Trump and McCain have been verbally sparring for some time, since McCain expressed a lack of support for Trump’s candidacy, prompting Trump to question the Senator’s status as a war hero.
“He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Iowa in July 2015.
The rivalry has been simmering up again since McCain voted down the repeal of Obamacare earlier this year.
Last week, McCain gave a speech in which he denounced “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems,” clearly a reference to Trump’s Presidency.
Trump responded in a radio interview, noting “I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back, and it won’t be pretty.”
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