Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg charged President Donald Trump with “fak[ing] a disability” to avoid military service during the Vietnam War, parroting an unsubstantiated left-wing conspiracy theory which relies upon rumor and speculation.
Mayoral meltdown
The South Bend, Indiana mayor made the inflammatory accusation on Thursday during an interview with Washington Post Live, where he claimed that President Donald Trump was “exploiting the system” when he received a disability waiver making him ineligible for the draft.
“I have a pretty dim view of [Trump’s] decision to use his privileged status to fake a disability in order to avoid serving in Vietnam,” Buttigieg said.
When Buttigieg, who served as a Navy intelligence officer in Afghanistan, was pressed on his baseless claim, he snapped back: “Do you believe he has a disability?”
“Yeah …,” Buttigieg continued. “I don’t mean to trivialize disability but I think that’s exactly what he did.”
Yet, for the 108,266 military service members diagnosed with mechanical degenerative arthritis between 1998 and 2008, that is precisely what Buttigieg accomplished. Arthritis is the leading cause of bone spurs, a serious medical condition which frequently affects young people, and Buttigieg should be admonished for dismissing the injury as a superficial ailment.
While studying at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1960s, Trump received four consecutive education deferments keeping him out of the Vietnam War. After graduating in May 1968 from the Wharton School, however, Trump was diagnosed with bone spurs, medically exempting him from future service.
He’s got a hunch
What evidence does Buttigieg have to render such a slanderous opinion of the president? There isn’t much to go on besides innuendo and hearsay.
The two daughters of a New York podiatrist who diagnosed Trump with the condition 51 years ago claim that their father, Dr. Larry Braunstein, diagnosed Trump with bone spurs in his heels as a “favor” to his landlord, Fred Trump. Elysa Braunstein and Sharon Kessel, who would have been 5 and 2 at the time of Trump’s diagnosis, claim that their father committed fraud for “access to Fred Trump,” who returned the favor by “fixing anything wrong in the building” he was leasing to the doctor.
However, there are reasons to be suspicious of this account. The New York Times described the sisters as “Democrats who oppose Trump.” They failed to produce “any documentation to back up their claims,” according to USA Today.
“Armed with this shoddy evidence, Buttigieg tore into the POTUS and accused him of “manipulating the ability to get a diagnosis.” The Indiana Democrat admitted to basing his theories on a hunch, and he even sympathized with wartime deserters who abandon their country out of overt cowardice.
“I mean, if he were a conscientious objector, I’d admire that,” Buttigieg said. “But this is somebody who it’s fairly obvious to most of us took advantage of that 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.”
“I know that that dredges up old wounds from a complicated time during a complicated war,” he added. “I’m also old enough to remember when conservatives talked about character.”
The moral low ground
This lecture about character comes from a mayor who recklessly bulldozed 1,000 lower-income homes in South Bend to make way for middle-class development, displacing thousands of poor people in the process. To explain the forced evictions, Buttigieg explained: “This is just how economic development happens.”
Much like his city’s gentrification project, Buttigieg is charging full steam ahead for the White House — facts be damned.
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