"Trump talks about ‘those people’ in the military, and the Internet reacts"

From: The Washington Post

A man who said that he’d be “so good at the military your head will spin” recently likened his time at an elite New York prep school to the equivalent of actually being in the military, according to a Tuesday article in the New York Times.

The man, none other than presidential hopeful and billionaire Donald Trump, made the remarks to his biographer while being interviewed for a book due out towards the end of the month.

“My number was so incredible and it was a very high draft number,” he told his biographer Michael D’Antonio, according to the Times. “Anyway so I never had to do that, but I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people.”

Trump, to be clear, never served in the military and managed to avoid the draft and subsequently Vietnam, with a high draft number and a physical ailment in the form of heel spurs.

The Internet and veterans responded accordingly.

The school—New York Military Academy—was founded in 1889, and according to its Web site, boasts a 100 percent college placement as well as a campus with a “clean, small town, fresh air atmosphere.”

In 1998, the school gave Trump the Alumnus of Distinction award. While no Bronze Star, the award is “in recognition of success or renown in a particular field of endeavor whose accomplishments have reflected creditably upon himself and the personnel or institutions associated with him.”

And while Trumps remarks seem asinine, junior military colleges have produced some pretty remarkable alumni. Both J.D. Salinger, author of “Catcher in the Rye” and H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commanding general of Operation Desert Storm, both attended Philadelphia-area Valley Forge Military Academy, a school similar to Trump’s alma mater.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/09/08/trump-talks-about-those-people-in-the-military-and-the-internet-reacts/