If you’ve noticed, Donald Trump has an issue with making claims that can be easily disproved. On Tuesday, for example, he said that “CNN did a poll recently where Obama and I are statistically tied … just call up CNN.” CNN was quick to point out that it never conducted this poll and that all recent polls show Trump trailing Obama by double digits. The only poll to show Trump and Obama statistically tied was from Newsweek two months ago, before Trump outed himself as a birther.
On the same morning that Trump fabricated a CNN poll out of thin air, he also sat down for an interview with Good Day New York. Asked by Greg Kelly how he managed to avoid serving in Vietnam, Trump told him:
Smartly, the Smoking Gun decided not to take Trump’s word for it and found that:
a) Trump had been out of school for eighteen months by the time the Selective Service held the draft lottery.
b) While Trump’s high number was never called, he also received a medical deferment in 1968 that would have spared him from service even if it had been, or had he gotten a lower number.
In fact, this isn’t even a new revelation: As the Smoking Gun writes, longtime Village Voice scribe Wayne Barrett wrote about the deferment in his 1992 biography of Trump. And the National Review notes that a 2005 biography of Trump by Gwenda Blair has the same info.
Still, the irony here is rich. After claiming for a month that President Obama’s birth certificate could refute Obama’s birth story, Trump’s own version of his biographical history was foiled by his records, which had to be dug up by an Internet muckraking site.
Deferments Helped Trump Dodge Vietnam [Smoking Gun]
