SEN. MCCAIN DECLINES TO LABEL TRUMP AS DRAFT DODGER

WASHINGTON Republican Sen. John McCain declined to label President Donald Trump a “draft dodger” Monday even as he renewed his veiled criticism of medical deferments that kept Trump from serving in the Vietnam War.

“I don’t consider him so much a draft dodger as I feel that the system was so wrong that certain Americans could evade their responsibilities to serve the country,” McCain said on ABC’s The View. McCain, a former Navy pilot and prisoner of war, was being pressed about comments in a C-SPAN interview aired Sunday where he lamented that the military “drafted the lowest income level of America and the highest income level found a doctor that would say they had a bone spur.”

One of Trump’s five draft deferments came as a result of a physician’s letter stating he suffered from bone spurs in his feet.

McCain, meanwhile, spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967. Yet during last year’s presidential campaign Trump said McCain was not a war hero because “I like people who weren’t captured.”

McCain left little doubt during Monday’s interview that he had been referring to Trump in his C-SPAN comments. When one of the hosts remarked that people thought he was talking about Trump because the president had sought a medical deferment, McCain interjected, “More than once, yes.”

McCain was asked to describe his relationship with the president. “Almost none” he simply said.