end of expose on traitor
If Trump doesn’t think that that’s heroic, then what, exactly, is admirable in his eyes?
And what was he doing while McCain was locked up in the infamous prison that POWs sarcastically dubbed the Hanoi Hilton?
During his time in school, Trump received four student deferments from the draft.
“One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly,” he wrote. “Another stuck a bayonet in my foot. The mob was really getting up-tight.”
He was interrogated for four days, losing consciousness as his captors tried to beat information out of him. But he refused.
As the voluble Trump was already making a name for himself sweet-talking deals for his dad’s real estate developing company, McCain was clamming up in his filthy prison.
And as Trump drove around Manhattan in his father’s limo, McCain was refusing to mention his dad for fear of handing valuable intelligence to the enemy.
McCain might have died from his injuries had the North Vietnamese not found out on their own that his father was an admiral. Instead, they moved him to a hospital and performed several botched operations on him. They sliced his knee ligaments by accident and couldn’t manage to set his bones.
“They had great difficulty putting the bones together, because my arm was broken in three places and there were two floating bones,” he wrote. “I watched the guy try to manipulate it for about an hour and a half trying to get all the bones lined up. This was without benefit of Novocain.”
That Christmas, as Donald Trump was celebrating the holiday with his family, McCain was starving in a prison camp called “The Plantation,” a satellite POW site near the Hanoi Hilton.
“I was down to about 100 pounds from my normal weight of 155,” he wrote. “I was told later on by [cellmate] Major Day that they didn’t expect me to live a week.”
McCain survived, however, slowly regaining his strength. By the spring of 1968, he had taught himself to walk again. Not that there was anywhere to walk. He was in solitary confinement inside a hot, stifling, windowless cell.
Trump, meanwhile, was taking Manhattan by storm. He had already made a small fortune — $200,000 then is almost $1.4 million today — working for his father during college.
In his autobiography, Trump describes these early years as fraught with danger:
a quick learning curve for the soon-to-be-celebrity CEO as he went around learning the business. “This was not a world I found very attractive,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”
“I’d just graduated from Wharton, and suddenly here I was in a scene that was violent at worst and unpleasant at best.”
The danger? Collecting rent
“One of the first tricks I learned was that you never stand in front of someone’s door when you knock. Instead you stand by the wall and reach over to knock,” Trump wrote of collecting for his father, who owned low-income housing blocks. “The first time a collector explained that to me I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. ‘What’s the point,’ I said. The point, he said, is that if you stand to the side, the only thing exposed to danger is your hand.”
“There were tenants who’d throw their garbage out the window, because it was easier than putting it in the incinerator,” he wrote in horror.
Meanwhile, McCain languished in a genuine hell. When he wasn’t being tortured — several times his interrogators rebroke his mended bones — he was battling everything from dysentery to hemorrhoids.
The prisoner of war survived on watery pumpkin soup and scraps of bread. He saw several fellow prisoners beaten to death, yet McCain refused to sign the confession that would have granted him a speedy release (and a publicity coup to the North Vietnamese).
Trump was living large — maybe not by today’s Trump standards but larger than most Americans. He ate in New York City’s finest restaurants, rode in his father’s limousines and began hitting the clubs with beautiful women.
Trump was frequenting “Studio 54 in the disco’s heyday and he said he thought it was paradise,” Timothy O’Brien wrote in “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” “His prowling gear at the time included a burgundy suit with matching patent-leather shoes,” O’Brien wrote.
“I saw things happening there that to this day, I have never seen again,” Trump told O’Brien. “I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room.”
March 14, 1973. McCain arrived back in the United States a physically broken man, but also a hero.
That word has yet to be applied to Trump.
That same year, the Department of Justice slapped the Trump Organization with a major discrimination suit for violating the Fair Housing Act.
