Trump was not in the military, but 'always felt' he was


Lifelong civilian Donald Trump reportedly says in a forthcoming biography that because he went to military boarding school, he "always" identified as a military man despite never actually being one:
"After the Vietnam War, all those military academies lost ground because people really disrespected the military," Mr. Trump said. "They weren’t sending their kids to military school. It was a whole different thing, but in those days — 1964 I graduated — that was a very good thing or tough thing, and it was a real way of life at military academy." [...]"My number was so incredible and it was a very high draft number. Anyway so I never had to do that, but I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people," he told [the biographer]. [The New York Times]
Trump also said that his time at boarding school provided him with better training than many members of the military. He was never actually drafted to go to Vietnam because he received medical deferments for heel spurs.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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