In 1997, Donald Trump, who showed his personal courage by dodging the draft in 1960’s, had the gall to compare his heroism by sleeping with multiple women to the heroism shown by the brave men and women who served the United States in Vietnam.
Interviewed by Howard Stern in 1997, Trump had the audacity to make the incredible claim that by risking his schlong to venereal disease from his sexual peccadilloes, his courage matched those who gave their lives facing mortar fire and bullets across the sea. Speaking of his sexual exploits, Trump bragged, “I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
Trump has a history of hyperbolic statements regarding his own courage, having likened his time in military boarding school to actual military training. He told the author of a book about Trump that his time in military school gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”
The rich man protected himself by gaining multiple deferments to avoid being drafted while others fought overseas.
Trump likening himself to genuine heroes dovetails with his “genuine” regard for veterans in general; Trump’s respect ends when it endangers his business. In 1991, he wrote a letter to John Dearie, then-chairman of the state Assembly’s Committee on Cities, decrying the presence of veterans who were peddling on Fifth Avenue. Trump wrote: “While disabled veterans should be given every opportunity to earn a living, is it fair to do so to the detriment of the city as a whole or its tax paying citizens and businesses? Do we allow Fifth Ave., one of the world’s finest and most luxurious shopping districts, to be turned into an outdoor flea market, clogging and seriously downgrading the area?”
The city of New York started making peddling exceptions for veterans in 1894 so disabled Civil War veterans could make a living.
“It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
Donald Trump, likening his risk of STDs from sleeping around to American soldiers in Vietnam
Of course, this is the same man of courage who said of Sen. John McCain, locked in a box for five years in Vietnam rather than desert his comrades-in-arms, “He’s not a war hero. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”
Trump comparing the risk of venereal disease to his genitals to the heroism of those who fought and died for their country is enough to turn your stomach.