Trump is mocked for thanking Vietnam veterans despite ‘bone spur’ draft dodge

President Donald Trump began Friday by honoring U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War, ignoring his own history of studiously avoiding a military draft that doomed tens of thousands of poorer Americans.

‘On this Vietnam War Veterans Day, we celebrate the brave Vietnam Veterans and all of America’s Veterans. Thank you for your service to our great Nation!’ Trump tweeted in a presidential gesture.

Twitter erupted with outrage from self-described members of the anti-Trump resistance.

‘Thank you for your lack of service and your fraudulent bone spurs. A**hole,’ wrote  pop-psychologist author Jeffrey Guterman.

Comedian Tony Posnanski piled on: ‘Thank you for everyone who didn’t dodge the draft five times.’

The president famously received five separate draft deferments during the 1960s and 70s, including one for a medical condition – a bone spur in his heel – that the diagnosing doctor’s children said last year was a ‘favor’ for Trump’s late father.

As candidate Trump navigated the instant firestorm of his early verbal slams at Sen. John McCain, dismissing his iconic war-hero status because ‘he was captured,’ he was asked to explain why he never served in uniform.

After an unperturbed Trump told reporters that day about his bone spur, he waved off a question about which foot had been the problem, saying someone would ‘have to check the records.’ He later claimed it was both.

McCain, who died in 2018, survived more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison after surviving the shoot-down crash of his U.S. Navy jet. He received a Purple Heart, a Silver Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Trump told radio shock-jock in 1997 that surviving the sex-fueled 1980s in Manhattan was his ‘personal Vietnam.’

Trump said bed-hopping with models made him feel like a ‘great and very brave soldier,’ and that he was ‘lucky’ to escape without a venereal disease.

Stern said that, in private, he and Trump had previously compared every woman’s vagina to a ‘potential land mine.

‘There is some real danger there,’ Trump joked during the broadcast.

Ultimately he conceded to New Hampshire voters in 2015 that he felt ‘a little guilty’ for not serving in Vietnam.

McCain said months before he died that he didn’t fault Trump for finding a way to avoid the draft but criticized the loopholes that gave the wealthy a way out.

He had said in a 2017 C-SPAN interview aired that the U.S. military ‘drafted the lowest-income level of America, and the highest-income level found a doctor that would say they had a bone spur.’

Days later on ‘The View,’ he put the obvious jab at the president in perspective.

‘I don’t consider him so much a draft dodger as I feel that the system was so wrong, that certain Americans could evade their responsibilities to serve the country,’ McCain said.

As president, Trump has made two separate trips to Vietnam including an aborted summit this year with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

And he has slammed Connecticut Democratic Sen. Dick Blumenthal as ‘Da Nang Dick’ for exaggerating his military service record to include overseas service in Vietnam that never happened.

Contrary to his claims, Blumenthal was never deployed to Vietnam as part of his Marine Corps Reserve service. He later confessed that he had ‘misspoken about my service, and I regret that and I take full responsibility.’