President Trump’s joke about Michael Dukakis tanked with the former Democratic presidential nominee.

Dukakis, who ran against George H.W. Bush, wasn’t happy about Trump mocking him for donning a helmet and riding in a tank during the 1988 campaign.

“I want to get into them but then I remember when a man named Dukakis got into a tank,” Trump said to laughter Wednesday during a visit to a tank factory in Lima, Ohio. “The helmet was bigger than he was. That was not good.”

Dukakis, a professor at Northeastern University, fired back by touting his own military service.

“I call Trump these days the draft-dodger-in-chief. While thousands of young Americans were fighting and dying in Vietnam, he was doing everything he could not to serve,” Dukakis, 85, told the Boston Globe in an interview. “Like thousands of young Americans, I served in the military, 16 months of which were seven miles from the DMZ in Korea.”

Dukakis pointed out that Trump got deferments from serving in Vietnam because of bone spurs in his heels, saying “just another rich kid who used his father’s influence to avoid military service.”

In the interview, Dukakis, a former governor of Massachusetts, also chewed out Trump for his dismissive comments about late GOP Sen. John McCain, a war hero who spent more than five years as a POW in Vietnam.

“John McCain served his country nobly and well. He spent five years in a cage in Vietnam,” Dukakis said. “And Trump’s continued attacks on him are just another example of someone who has no sense of honor, no sense of integrity, and is absolutely gutless.”

McCain died of brain cancer last August.

The photo op of a grinning Dukakis wearing a military helmet while riding in an M1A1 Abrams tank was meant to fortify his credentials to become commander-in-chief in light of Bush’s military service during World War II.

Instead, it created the wrong impression and was played in heavy rotation in Bush campaign ads.