During a live-streamed interview with Washington Post reporter Robert Costa earlier today, Pete Buttigieg was asked if he thought Donald Trump should have served in the Vietnam War.
“Well, 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,” the former Naval intelligence officer replied.
Trump, as you may recall, avoided the draft by receiving not one, not two, but five deferments. Four of them he received by attending college. The fifth came when he got a doctor’s note saying he suffered from painful and debilitating “bone spurs.”
When asked by Costa if he believed Trump’s “bone spur” condition, Buttigieg answered the question with another question: “Do you think he has a disability?”
Buttigieg then joked that, yes, he thinks Trump has a disability, just “not that one.”
The comment was met with laughter from the audience, but Mayor Pete was quick to note that, humor aside, he has serious concerns about Trump’s feigning a chronic health condition in an effort to skirt the draft.
“I don’t mean to trivialize disability, but I think that’s exactly what he did,” he said, adding, “If he were a conscientious objector, I’d admire that.”
“But this is somebody who, I think it’s fairly obvious to most of us, took advantage of the fact he was the child of a multi-millionaire in order to pretend to be disabled so that somebody could go to war in his place.”
Asked whether he was concerned about how Trump might respond to Buttigieg’s biting criticisms, the 2020 hopeful wasn’t the least bit concerned.
“I don’t have a problem standing up to somebody who was working on Season 7 of The Celebrity Apprentice when I was packing my bags for Afghanistan,” he said.
