Trump's Awkward Relationship With the Troops (Timeline)

Nobody knows more about ISIS than Donald Trump does. Or about hunting down enemies. Or preventing terrorist attacks — believe him. The 45th president lacks military experience but seems to believe he would have served his country better than any of the men and women who actually chose to do so. He also brings his now familiar lack of tact and diplomacy to military traditions, which typically call for a measure of stately decorum. Here are the most striking examples of when Trump absolutely did not support the troops.

1968

Trump is diagnosed with bone spurs, allowing him to dodge the draft for a final time, following four deferments during college. (The bone spurs, he later claims, healed on their own — not something bone spurs are known to do.) But sleeping around and not contracting STDs was his own “personal Vietnam,” he once said.

July 2015

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump says of Sen. John McCain, who spent five years as a prisoner of war. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

July 2016

After Khizr Khan, father of fallen Muslim soldier Capt. Humayun Khan, criticizes Trump at the Democratic National convention, saying Trump has “sacrificed nothing” for his country, Trump attacks the grieving father and speculates that a Clinton staffer wrote the speech and suggested Khan’s wife, Ghazala Khan, who appeared with him at the event, “wasn’t allowed” to speak.

October 2016

Speaking to a veterans group, Trump suggests that soldiers suffering from PTSD aren’t “strong.”


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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-military-794412/