Trump's five military deferments are back in the spotlight after the senator's comments.
Senator John McCain appeared to make a veiled dig at the president for receiving a draft deferment for bone spurs during the Vietnam War.
"One aspect of the conflict, by the way, that I will never ever countenance is that we drafted the lowest income level of America and the highest income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur," McCain said in an interview with C-SPAN Sunday. “That is wrong. If we’re going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve.”
Donald Trump received four draft deferments for education and one additional medical deferment for bone spurs, while McCain was a POW in North Vietnam for five-and-a-half years after his plane was shot down in 1967.
In the C-Span interview, McCain never said Trump by name.
On Monday, McCain appeared on The View, where his daughter Meghan is a co-host, and explained his comments further.
“What I was trying to say is one of the great inequities of the Vietnam conflict is the lowest income Americans went and fought and were drafted, and those who were wealthy enough to get a doctor to say, 'Hey, you've got a bone spur or migraines,' or whatever it is...then they were excused," he said.
When asked if he thought Trump was a Draft Dodger, the Arizona senator, who is now fighting brain cancer, said the New York real estate tycoon-turned-president wasn’t "so much a draft dodger, as I feel that the system is so wrong that certain Americans can evade their responsibility to serve the country."
During the campaign, Trump made a jaw-dropping comment about McCain's military service, saying in 2015: “He's a hero because he was captured. I like people who aren't captured.”
