From the NY Times
In a 2011 television interview, Mr. Trump described watching the draft lottery as a college student and learning then that he would not be drafted.
“I’ll never forget; that was an amazing period of time in my life,” he said in the interview, on Fox 5 New York. “I was going to the Wharton School of Finance, and I was watching as they did the draft numbers, and I got a very, very high number.”
…
But Mr. Trump had graduated from Wharton 18 months before the lottery — the first in the United States in 27 years — was held.
Trump seems to have been lying for some time, crediting a high draft lottery number rather than his possibly fake heel spurs for the deferment he received after his deferments for college. His heel spur claim made him ineligible, so his draft number was also meaningless.
But he most certainly lied about when he got his draft number, and clearly invented a story he’d “never forget,” rather than making a mistake.
Should anyone believe Trump on any issue? Certainly not.
Personally, I think the entire news media should get together and let Dan Rather do a special 60 minutes episode on Trump’s draft dodge and the subsequent lies. A little balancing out of the universe as it should have been. We don't need to expose anything more than the lies Trump’s already told, though I'd assume he’ll dig himself deeper in the meantime.
For me, it's not the draft dodge, but the brazen sociopathic lying, the making up a fake story — that's where this starts. It puts his lack of integrity center stage, and calls into question the entire health deferment, of which his own description, as outlined in the NY Times article, is very sketchy. It's also notable that he was a college athlete.
There are plenty of people who tried to avoid Vietnam for good reasons. It always leaves a bad taste when spoiled rich kids did it fraudulently, but some Americans probably had moral reasons to dodge the draft. It's a topic full of contradiction and difficulty. I'm not necessarily the kind of person who condemns people for draft dodging. But it’s certainly something that some voters would expect to understand about a candidate.
And I certainly think people should know Trump invented a fake story to hide his heel spur deferment. That was a lie about his draft history. If he were a Democrat, it would probably be a disqualifier for the presidency.
But Republicans at all levels still support his candidacy. Where’s their so called patriotism, I wonder?