Mayor Pete Buttigieg hammered Donald Trump for using his privilege to fake a disability to avoid serving in the Vietnam war in an interview with the Washington Post on Thursday morning. Trump received five deferments from the Vietnam war, one of which was a diagnosis of “bone spurs” in his heels, which was made by the doctor as a favor to his landlord, Fred Trump, according to the doctor’s daughters.
Said Buttigieg: “I don’t have a problem standing up to somebody who was working on Season 7 of Celebrity Apprentice when I was packing my bags for Afghanistan. … I have a pretty dim view of his decision to use his privileged status to fake a disability in order to avoid serving in Vietnam.”
“You believe he faked a disability?” asked Robert Costa.
“Do you believe he has a disability?” replied Buttigieg.
Responding to Costa, Buttigieg went on: “Yeah, at least not that one. This is actually really important because I don’t mean to trivialize disability, but I think that’s exactly what he did. When you think about the way somebody can exploit the system, and needless to say, the way he has treated and mocked disabled people is just one more example of the many affronts to basic decency that this president has inflicted on this country.”
“I mean, if he were a conscientious objector, I’d admire that,” Buttigieg continued. “But this is somebody who I think it’s fairly obvious … took advantage of the fact that he was the child of a multimillionaire in order to pretend to be disabled so that somebody could go to war in his place.”
