Donald Trump Avoided Vietnam War Through Foot Doctor Who Did A Favor To His Father, Per ‘NYT’


As he notably recalled in a 2016 interview, President Donald Trump was medically exempted from serving in the Vietnam War due to bone spurs in his heels. While the president had also admitted that he no longer remembers who made the diagnosis, a new report from the New York Times suggests that the “mystery” of the “timely” medical exemption might have been explained by the daughters of a Queens-based podiatrist who rented office space from Trump’s father, real estate developer Fred C. Trump.

According to a report published by the New York Times on Wednesday, the foot doctor in question, Dr. Larry Braunstein, passed away in 2007. However, his daughters claimed to the publication that their father offered a courtesy to the elder Trump by assisting his son Donald with his medical exemption from the Vietnam War draft.

Speaking to the New York Times, Elysa Braunstein said she clearly remembers her father doing Fred Trump a “favor,” given that the elder Braunstein suggested the young Donald Trump did not actually have a foot ailment serious enough to prevent him from serving in Vietnam. She added, however, that she isn’t sure whether her father actually examined the future president or not.

“What he got was access to Fred Trump,” Elysa Braunstein continued.

“If there was anything wrong in the building, my dad would call and Trump would take care of it immediately. That was the small favor that he got.”

While Elysa Braunstein and her younger sister, Sharon Kessel, hinted that a second foot doctor named Dr. Manny Weinstein might have also helped Donald Trump with his exemption, the New York Times stressed that there has been no written literature to back up the Braunstein family’s account, while “detailed” government records for Vietnam War draft medical exemptions are no longer available. Weinstein, who was living in a Fred Trump-owned apartment in the same year Donald Trump was exempted from the draft, passed away in 1995.

In an interview with the New York Times in 2016, Donald Trump recalled submitting a “very strong letter” that explained his medical condition to draft officials. However, he was not able to remember the name of the doctor who diagnosed him, as close to five decades had passed since the events in question. Trump also told the publication that he still possessed documents that could prove the bone spurs diagnosis, but was not able to provide them at the time of the interview.

As for the suggestion that Fred Trump had tried to curry favor with a foot doctor in order to get Donald Trump exempted from serving in the Vietnam War, the New York Times noted that it was not uncommon for sons of the “wealthy and connected” to avoid military service with the help of their influential families. Donald Trump, however, said in a 2014 interview with biographer Michael D’Antonio that he wasn’t one of those young men who took that route.

“I had no power. My father was a Brooklyn developer, so it wasn’t like today.”

In any case, Donald Trump’s medical exemption for bone spurs has drawn a lot of criticism from a number of individuals, including the late senator and Vietnam War veteran John McCain, who questioned how someone from the “highest income level” could get such an exemption, as quoted in 2017 by CNN. Furthermore, the New York Times pointed out how Trump’s statements on his exemptions seemed to shift over the years, as the president had often claimed to have been spared from service because of a “high draft lottery number,” despite having been medically exempted for over a year at that time.

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