The top-dog Carnival Barker has a little memory problem (via The Smoking Gun):
Despite Donald Trump’s claim this week that he avoided serving in the Vietnam War solely due to a high draft number, Selective Service records show that the purported presidential aspirant actually received a series of student deferments while in college and then topped those off with a medical deferment after graduation that helped spare him from fighting for his country, The Smoking Gun has learned.
And after boasting about his unforgettable memory of the period…
“I actually got lucky because I had a very high draft number. I’ll never forget, that was an amazing period of time in my life.”
He went on to recall, “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 and those numbers never got up to.” The word “deferment” was not mentioned by Trump during his chat with the morning show hosts on WNYW, the Fox affiliate in New York City.
…he got it wrong…. Way wrong.
In fact, the December 1969 draft lottery occurred about 18 months after Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied business at the Wharton School.
The story of Trump’s numerous deferments is interesting, particularly since he has, apparently, forgotten about them entirely when pressed on his lack of military service. It is his final deferment, disqualification after a medical examination, that caught my attention:
October 15, his classification was switched to 1-Y, which was given to men deemed qualified for military service “only in time of national emergency.”
The 1-Y classification came a month after Trump underwent an “Armed Forces Physical Examination,” according to Selective Service records, which note the results of the exam as “DISQ.”
Here is the extract of Trump’s Selective Classification record provided to The Smoking Gun following their TSG records request (click for larger image):
What caught my attention was the line labeled “Entries from Remarks Column” that says, simply, “YXX”.
Huh? Would that be YXX as in one extra X chromosome? The condition, called Klinefelter syndrome, is not uncommon–it occurs in somewhere from 0.1% to 0.2% of males. Aside from having an extra X chromosome, these are symptoms of Klinefelter syndrome:
- Abnormal body proportions (long legs, short trunk, shoulder equal to hip size)
- Abnormally large breasts (gynecomastia)
- Infertility
- Sexual problems
- Less than normal amount of pubic, armpit, and facial hair
- Small, firm testicles
- Tall height
Hmmm….
Among other things, the syndrome increases ones risk of attention deficient hyperactivity disorder, autoimmune disorders, depression, and learning disabilities (including dyslexia).
Hmmm….
So, while I cannot be certain the “YXX” note really means Trump was disqualified because he suffers a chromosomal disorder, it would explain the medical disqualification. And his lousy memory!
And the only way to know for sure is for Trump to—you got it—release his medical records. Otherwise, we will never know whether the Republican’s latest star candidate has a chromosomal disease….
Actually, Trump having little-bitty-balls would explain a lot!
The surplus of testosterone that was the McCain/Palin ticket never seemed right for a party that seems scared of just about everyone and everything. No more of that “man’s man” stuff in 2012!
For the Party of Bedwetters, this is just about perfect.
Trump/Palin 2012: “You’re Fired!” “I Quit!”
Following the death of a friend in Vietnam I let my 2S deferment expire although I was continuing with school. The rule back then was, if you weren’t drafted in that calendar year you were classified 1A, you would be reclassified. I made it through the year without being drafted even though I had a very low lottery number.
In January of the following year I got a notice to report for a physical, which I missed. I then got a call from the draft board. I asked why they were calling me in for a physical given that my deferment had expired the previous year and that I had made it through the remainder of that year without being called up. The guy said that, although my 2S had expired in October of the previous year, I wasn’t reclassified 1A until the following January and would be exposed to the draft for the entire year. I followed by asking what my classification was in those interim months if I was neither 2S nor 1A. He had no answer. A couple weeks later I got a new draft card in the mail with what I recall was a 4H classification.
I sometimes think we were better off with the draft. If America’s youth had their asses on the line, they’d have be out protesting en mass all these bullshit wars of the last half century.
4 – The new draft are these “stop-loss” orders. Pretty weak though. Some former military lucky enough to survive are being transformed into dissenting activists but not nearly enough.
The all-volunteer military has worked wonders for the all-war-all-the-time crowd and the dropping of DADT will be good as well – they need every body with a pulse they can get to fight all the wars they want to fight and if the gays and people of color are the ones doing all the dying – so much the better.
@4
My dad’s flat footed, blind as a bat, and allergic to wool and he still got drafted for Korea. He went through basic training and then served on week a month at Madigan Hospital at Fort Lewis. If we go to war, we should all go to war.
4 and 6
I think I’m coming around to that point of view. When only our poor, unemployed, and disenfranchised have to go overseas to fight, our wars never become personalized. I doubt we’d be in either Iraq or Afghanistan right now if the sons and daughters of our Corporatacracy were exposed to danger.
@7
They don’t even have to be exposed to danger over seas, when the Nat. Guard got called up a lot of small town cops and EMT’s got shipped off. They could helpout at home.
Hey, have we seen Trump’s long-form birth cert.?
I have noted that Trump says the word ‘fabulous’ a little too often. To put this in perspective, I never heard MervGriffin EVER say fabulous — although he often cryptically referred to his ‘loverly buncha cocoanuts’.
re 3: Good one! I’ll save it up for when I’m arguing politics with some conservatives.
We’ve lost our notion of citizenship. The Romans understood this. You had to EARN being a citizen, and that meant everyone had to go out and serve the state. I think one year of some sort of civic service, not fighting a war necessarily, maybe doing relief work in some equatorial pit of hell, SHOULD be compulsory if you want to do things like vote, own property, RUN FOR OFFICE. Now, being a citizen is just showing up and taking all you can for yourself with no notion of TRUE patriotism or loyalty, it’s all platitudes and bullshit.
This guy wants to be the highest ranking military officer and he gets, what, SIX deferments? SCUM BAG a la Cheney.
RE: Trump’s draft status. I suspected as much, as soon as I saw the 1968 graduation date in his bio. (I think I even posted something here about that). It didn’t bother me too much, except when he started talking about invading Libya in order to seize their oil.
I can’t even begin to guess why he was classified “4F”, but that “1Y” classification is pretty suspect. I think Karl Rove was also classified either as “1Y” or “1H” for a while, which seems to be the general classification used to protect politically favored potential draftees until another excuse can be found for them not to serve.
I was too young for the draft at that time, but I knew guys who would get their draft notices within a couple of months of graduating high school. One such fellow I knew had been the Sr. Patrol Leader of my Boy Scout Troop, an Eagle Scout, and head of his Explorer Post. He got good grades in school too, and had been accepted for college in the fall, but when he got his draft notice he decided not to push through his student deferrment and volunteered for Vietnam duty instead.
Two years later he came back, in a sense, but most of what had made him who he was was left back in Vietnam – he was an alchoholic and a drug addict, homeless and accumulating an arrest record for minor crimes. His body was intact, but his mind was not. We never found out what happened to him over there.
In the meantime, Karl Rove was excused from the draft so he could learn dirty campaign tricks from the Watergate plumbers (no, that’s not an exaggeration), and Donald Trump was learning how to evict people from his Daddy’s buildings.
@12 Just about every male who went to college during the Vietnam war had at least four student deferments, more if one went to graduate school.
# 14: I may be wrong, but I believe graduate school didn’t count toward a student deferrment, unless it was in a field the military deemed useful to them. A friend of mine was able to put off getting drafted when he got his undergraduate degree by going to law school, with the understanding that he was going directly into the Army after getting his J.D. degree. And that’s what he did, serving stateside the entire time.
A comment he made to me was that it wasn’t that hard to avoid going into combat in Vietnam if you knew the system – and one aspect of the “system” was that you knew which skills the army valued, and which wouldn’t be needed in a combat zone. Being a JAG corps lawyer was one of them. He spent most of his enlistment reviewing government procurement contracts in the Pentagon, which he described as being so boring he almost volunteered for Vietnam just to get out of it. In the Pentagon, being a captain in the army meant you were on about the same status level as the hat rack – literaly. He was told by quite a few generals to stand by quietly and hold their hats for them while they talked for an hour or more.
He finally got out by being transferred to a unit in Georgia which, he found out, was airborne – so they didn’t even let him unpack, they sent him straight to jump school.
Steve @4:
I believe your draft card post-eligibility carried the designation I-H, not 4-H (or IV-H). That classification was defined as:
That’s how they designated men who had been I-A but not called during a calendar year. Which, of course, describes what you’d actually done.
I went from II-S to (briefly) I-A in 1971, the second year of the lottery. I dropped the deferment as soon as I learned that the draft that year would not go beyond 125 (my lottery number was 149). In 1970, they reached 195.
Unlike The Donald, I was an undergraduate student throughout that period. Therefore, my student deferment was legitimate. His high lottery number (at least he got that right … June 14 was #356) doesn’t explain how he missed induction in the first 11 months of 1966 or the first 6 months of 1968.
In fact, Trump’s draft lottery position was completely irrelevant to his non-service in the military. He’d been classified I-Y (“Registrant available for military service, but qualified for military only in the event of war or national emergency”) for well over a year before he “earned” his lottery number, and he was never reclassified to I-A or I-H after the lottery came into effect.
@15 “I may be wrong”
It appears that you are at least partially correct – it depends on the year. Here’s an old article about the 1967 Draft Act.
http://www.thecrimson.com/arti.....where-you/
rhp6033 @15:
I concur about graduate programs and II-S status. Medical students could maintain their deferments, but grad students in nearly all academic fields couldn’t.
And on the face of it, an MBA — even from a school as prestigious as Wharton (much more distinguished than Dubya’s Harvard degree) — should rank even lower on the “military usefulness” scale than any academic program.
@16 Point well taken. It’s an over forty year-old memory of my draft status. It could well have been I-H, not VI-H. I’m sure I still have that old draft card around somewhere but I haven’t run across it in many years.
From the 1967 Draft Act
* Graduate students in 1967-68 will keep their deferments–M.A. candidates for one year, and Ph.D. candidates for no more than four. A candidate for a professional or doctoral degree who was in school last year has a total of five years, including those he has already completed, to earn his degree. Then he will go into the pool of maximum eligibility even if he is over the age of 25.
* Last June’s college graduates entering graduate school for the first time this fall will be deferred for only one year, when they will enter the pool of maximum eligibility along with this year’s college seniors. These students will continue to be eligible for deferment for graduate study, or for occupational deferment, if the field is deemed “essential to the national interest” by the local board.
I wouldn’t be surprised if HIPAA rules (no pun intended) trumped FOIA.
I’m a year older than Trump. They dumped student deferments before I was to start my junior year at the UW and my lottery number was 137. To find out if it was even worth bothering to sign up for fall classes (and to give the research department where I worked as a technician time to replace me) I requested that I be officially “called up” to go through the physical. Turns out that a couple of poor souls had died in boot camp due to congenital heart problems, so when I showed up they were going over all of us very carefully and sending people home with deferments for stuff they didn’t know they had. (About the same time, Walt Crowley got called up and learned he had a bleeding ulcer.) With me, they decided I had a “neurological condition” (turned out to be Tourette’s, but nobody knew what that was back then) and sent me home with a 1-Y. Later I received notice that I’d been reclassified 4-F. I think they did that with most of the 1-Y’s to simplify the record keeping.
The big story here is NOT the deferment but the cryptic XXY notation.
If Darryl is right, then Trump had a major genetic disorder. This would raise issues of how and whether he actually fathered his children.
The real implication here is that Trump, if he is playing by his own bizarro rules, needs to put forward his karyotype!
Of course, by the same thinking Romney and Huntsman probably should publish there genomes, given the special nature of their Mormon origins.
I would go one step further, a VERY large number of “white” folks, .. esp those who claim a long American heritage, are “contaminated” by non white blood. Since racism is so important in America, it seems to me that candidates for the Republican nomination all ought to volunteer to disclose their genomes.
As a service to the HA community, here is my best guess about what this would show:
Sarah Palin: Aryan with nearly complete preservation of Neanderthal genome.
Newt Gingrich: Caucasian with about 1/4 salting of Agrican and just a pinch of yid.
Rick Santorum: Cromagnon diluted by Viking with prominent asian origin. Likely descended from Ghenghis Kahn.
Bachman: XY female, with testosterone excess. Ancestors from pure Aryna blood and indendent of known primates.
Ron Paul: Asian with a dollop of French/Italian. Some sequences in the Y suggests an intercourse with a bull.
Mit Romney: Caucasian with Cherokee, Aztec, and Neanderthal admixture.
Donal Trump: Neanderthal-Semitic. Both of his X chromosomes are nearly identical and largely Semitic in origin. This is most easuly explained if he is the lineal descendent of a male immaculately conceived about 100 generations (2000 years) by pathogenesis.
Huntsman: Decidedly human, largely Caucasian but may have origins from Sasquatch or other near humans.
I, generally, call myself an an American of American decent as some of my ancestors were here prior to the revolution (fought in it, actually). As for my whiteness, I doubt I’ve ever brought that up without the word trash preceding it.
@21
They do in a big way.
@21
But, that doesn’t mean that The Donald can’t voluntarily release them. Maybe we should make him release pictures of his nuts too, just to be sure…
I think Trump’s shenanigans have pretty much ended the Republicans’ chances for the White House in 2012. That’s fine by me because I was never going to vote for them anyway.
# 16, 18: Donald Trump doesn’t have an MBA. He graduated from a military prep school, New York Military Acadamy in 1964, and went on to attend Fordham University for two years, after which he transfered to the Univ. of Pennsylvania (Wharton School) and graduated in 1968 with a B.S. in Economics.
I was a little surprised by this, the way he throws around “The Warton School” like it’s a sword that no one dares question as being superior credentials to any held by anyone else. But I suspect it’s intentional, by referring to both Fordham and Wharton, he can give the impression that he has a B.S. (or B.A.) AND and MBA, without actually saying so. The Wharton School may well also host an MBA program, but Trump never was in a graduate study program there, he himself says he went to work for his father right after graduation.
So despite Trump’s attempts to question Obama’s academic credentials, the fact his that Obama has a law degree, technically known as a Juris Doctorate, a three-year equivilent to a doctorate program in any other field. And not just ANY law degree, but a law degree from what is arguably the highest-ranked law school in the country, from which he graduated Magna Cum Laude (with Highest Honors), and was President of the Law Review. (The latter isn’t an honorary position or even a popularity contest – to even be selected to be on the editorial staff the candidate has to have finished their first year in the top 10% of your class).
“from which he graduated Magna Cum Laude (with Highest Honors)”
You flunk Latin 101.
Summa is “highest.”
Trump got a medical deferment? Rush’s ass pimple must be contagious.
Trump claims that CNN ran a poll that said he was leading in the presidential race. CNN never ran such a poll.
http://politicalticker.blogs.c.....ch-a-poll/
“I’ll never forget, that was an amazing period of time in my life.”
That was an amazing period in my life, too, and I’ll never forget it, either.
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a fucking saint. I camped on a student deferment for 4 years just like Trump did. And I was a 4-F just like Trump was. I’m so damned myopic, when they asked me to “read the third line of the chart on the wall,” I responded, “which wall?” I couldn’t even see the fucking chart.
I could have gotten out of it. I volunteered, you see. Why not? When I graduated from college, I didn’t have a cushy job working for a multimillionaire dad waiting for me. So I enlisted. Because I went, The Donald didn’t have to. This is one of those deals where one rabbit was worth a whole platoon of Donald Trumps.
My bad eyesight created some problems — and also opportunities — in the combat environment of Vietnam, but I won’t get into the details of that. Let’s just say that I’m so myopic I couldn’t tell difference between their soldiers and our soldiers through the iron sights of an M-16. “No problem,” I told my sergeant, “I’ll just shoot at anything that moves and let God sort ’em out.” This attitude quickly got me upgraded to better duties.
Now Trump is running for president and I’m not. Maybe I ought to be. If you want another lying, embellishing, weasel-mouthed rich guy in the White House, vote for him. No doubt that resume appeals to a lot of Republicans out there. If you want an Army Of One, vote for Roger Rabbit. Unlike Trump, I don’t have to fake my patriotism; I’m the real deal.
Don’t be fooled by Republican patriotic talk. They’re the party that savaged Max Cleland, a triple-amputee war hero, and elected Saxby Chambliss, a draft dodger. They’re the party whose leaders compiled a war record that looks like this:
George W. Bush – went AWOL from National Guard
Dick Cheney – 5 deferments, never served
Phil Gramm – 4 deferments, never served
John Ashcroft – 7 deferments, never served
Jeb Bush – never served
Karl Rove – never served
Dennis Hastert – never served
Bill Frist – never served
Dick Armey – never served
Tom DeLay – never served
Newt Gingrich – never served
Trent Lott – never served
Saxby Chambliss – claimed “bad knee,” never served
Mitch McConnell – never served
Rick Santorum – never served
Roy Blunt – never served
Richard Shelby – never served
Dana Rohrabacher – never served
John M. McHugh – never served
JC Watts – never served
Jack Kemp – never served becaue of “knee problem” that didn’t keep him from playing in NFL for 8 years
Arnold Schwarzenegger – went AWOL from Austrian army
George Pataki – never served
Spencer Abraham – never served
John Engler – never served
Elliott Abrams – never served
Paul Wolfowitz – never served
Vin Weber – never served
Richard Perle – never served
Douglas Feith – never served
Rudy Guiliani – never served
Kenneth Starr – never served
Antonin Scalia – never served
Clarence Thomas – never served
Ralph Reed – never served
Michael Medved – never served
Charlie Daniels – never served
Ted Nugent – never served
Jon Kyl – never served
Tim Hutchison – never served
Christopher Cox – never served
George Will – never served
Chris Matthews – never served
Bill O’Reilly – never served
Sean Hannity – never served
Rush Limbaugh – never served
Michael Savage – never served
Paul Gigot – never served
Bill Bennett – never served
Pat Buchanan – never served
Pat Robertson – never served
Bill Kristol – never served
Ann Coulter – never served
Now you can add Trump to the JACH* list too.
* Just Another Chicken Hawk — buck-buck, cluck-buck-buck, cluck-cluck …
@1 “Actually, Trump having little-bitty-balls would explain a lot!”
It actually looks like he had no balls at all.
@5 “if the gays and people of color are the ones doing all the dying”
They figured out the second half of this way back then — if you were black in Vietnam, you were a grunt, period — but, yeah, you wonder why it took them so long to figure out this is a good (and legal) way to kill off gays.
@15 Every enlistee was required to select three occupational specialities, one of which had to be combat arms (infantry, artillery, or armor).
The latest poll I’ve seen has Obama beating Trump 69%-31%, so I sure hope Trump is the GOP nominee.
@35 At the beginning of WWII, my uncle had just finished law school. He enlisted in the Army, hoping to be made a JAG. Instead, after OCS someone looked at his math grades and decided he was better suited to become an artillery officer. Consequently, after first nearly freezing to death in the Aleutians, he participated in a half dozen more campaigns in the Pacific, bouncing above the battle lines in an olive drab Piper Cub radioing coordinates to the guys on the ground running the howitzers.
There’s of course the very slight possibility that Trump is the left’s answer to James O’Keefe, deliberately goading the GOP’s more lunatic factions into so discrediting the entire party that it drives everyone else to the other side. Otherwise, regardless of his chromosome count, his draft record, the count of women with with huge plastic tits he’s been in the sack with, ow whatever the hell that thing is on his head, it would seem that he’s an insufferably arrogant, preposterously ignorant, self-impressed jerk who doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea what being “leader of the free world” is all about except that it sounds impressive. In other words, he’s completely unqualified.
@38 So what’s new about a Republican candidate being an unqualified, womanizing, ignoramus? They all are.