Liberal Forum

Trump’s desperate Vietnam gamble.

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Trump had four student deferments as he completed undergraduate and graduate college work, and when they ran out, he got a doctor to certify him as damaged goods due to spurious bone spurs.
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I don’t judge harshly Donald Trump and his history with avoiding the draft, and I doubt that many in our generation do.

I came to describe that time as the “damned if you did, damned if you didn’t” years.

If you allowed yourself to get drafted and served, you were damned by those who opposed the war.

If you dodged the draft and avoided Vietnam — for any reason, moral or otherwise — there were those who damned you as not living up to your obligations as a citizen and moreover as a man.

This produced an incredibly confused split in our generation which more than 50 years has not lessened.

Our history is so strife torn and riven with contradictions and pain that none of us should be using it to harm one another.

It doesn’t accomplish anything, it’s not fair, and it’s just not right, so of course it’s exactly what Trump is doing.

Trump is reflexively using that split over Vietnam in the service of his career as president, most recently in his unhinged attack on Senator Richard Blumenthal for his mixed record on Vietnam.

“Interesting to watch Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut talking about hoax Russian collusion when he was a phony Vietnam con artist!” Trump tweeted on Monday morning after watching Blumenthal supporting the Russia investigation on CNN.

Trump’s thumbs continued to thwack: “Never in U. S. history has anyone lied or defrauded voters like Senator Richard Blumenthal.

He told stories about his Vietnam battles and . . . conquests, how brave he was, and it was all a lie.

He cried like a baby and begged for forgiveness like a child.”

Apart from the fact that Trump was attacking Blumenthal for advocating upholding the law, and the fact that much of Trump’s attack is an outright lie — Blumenthal said that he had served in the war when in fact he had remained stateside while serving in the Marine Reserves — Blumenthal never “told stories about his battles and conquests” or “how brave he was,” much less “cried like a baby and begged for forgiveness like a child.”

On the contrary, when Blumenthal was caught out with his misstatement about his career — almost eight years ago — he apologized, and until Monday, he and everyone else in the world had moved on.

Not Trump. He used Vietnam as a bludgeon to clobber Blumenthal, as usual lying about him outrageously as he did it.

Why? That’s the question I have.

The war in Vietnam is the third rail for our generation, politically and in every other way.

Remember the attacks on Clinton for dodging the draft?

They went after him with a howitzer when it was revealed that Clinton had attended a demonstration against the war overseas when he was at Oxford.

Heavens! Not only was he a draft dodger, he wasn’t a patriot!

It hardly bears repeating to go over Trump’s various unpatriotic acts and statements while overseas, not to mention the role overseas Russians played in his election campaign. So let’s leave that to history.

What we shouldn’t ignore, however, is the reason Trump completely lost it on Monday morning with his insane tweets attacking Senator Blumenthal.

He is so frightened of the investigation of himself and his campaign by Special Counsel Mueller that he actually conflated Blumenthal’s military record with Russian “collusion.”

Huh? That’s not reaching; that’s pure unfettered desperation.

Our president is like a rabid raccoon, lashing out wildly, teeth bared, apparently prepared to fight to the death against the investigation which threatens his presidency more and more every day.

The thing about raccoons is, they can climb trees to avoid being caught.

Trump is marooned on the earth, where he finds himself in the crosshairs of Mueller’s investigation.

Poor guy.

He should have put on the uniform and gone through basic training and even taken that long dreadful flight to the combat zone whether he would carry a rifle when he got there or not.

Might have given him some of what the Army used to call “character,” because he — and we — sure as hell could use some right now.