Donald Trump, that great friend of veterans, was at a rally in Ashburn, VA, today. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with the geography of Northern Virginia, Ashburn is near a Trump-owned golf course located on the site of the infamous “River of Blood” battlefield that Trump invented.) During the rally he was approached by a veteran.
Trump told the audience during his rally that “something very nice just happened to me. A man came up to me and he handed me his Purple Heart.”
As the audience aahed, Trump continued: “I said to him, ‘Is that like the real one or is that a copy? And he said, ‘That’s my real Purple Heart. I have such confidence in you.’”
“And I said, ‘Man that’s big stuff.’ I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier, but I tell you it was such an honor.”
Trump, who identified the veteran as retired Lt. Col. Louis Dorfman, then brought him up on stage and shook hands, holding the award up again for the crowd. According to records, Dorfman was wounded in action in November 2007 in Iraq.
“I always wanted to get the Purple Heart.” Really? The Purple Heart is given for wounds received in combat. There may be people out there who crave a Purple Heart but they are few and far between. When I was an ROTC cadet the lieutenant colonel who led our detachment was an SF veteran with six, count them, six Purple Hearts. He called them “wrong place, wrong time” awards.
Ironically, Trump had several opportunities to get a Purple Hear but he was able to connive five draft deferments to avoid military service during the Vietnam War.
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 2, 2016
As Shakespeare wrote in Henry IV
And telling me the sovereignest thing on earth
Was parmacity for an inward bruise,
And that it was great pity, so it was,
This villainous saltpetre should be digged
Out of the bowels of the harmless earth,
Which many a good fellow had destroyed
So cowardly, and but for these vile guns,
He would himself have been a soldier.
And then there is this footnote:
The man who gave Trump his purple heart told me earlier today, it was a copy of his purple heart.
— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) August 2, 2016
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