Sen. John McCain took an indirect shot at President Donald Trump for his infamous deferment during the Vietnam War, in an interview with CSPAN Sunday.

"[W]e drafted the lowest income level of America and the highest income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur. That is wrong. That is wrong," McCain said.

Advertisement:

When Trump was in college from 1964 to 1968, he received four draft deferments for education. But in 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War, Trump received a 1-Y medical deferment for bone spurs on the heels of his feet.

Trump had an otherwise pristine medical history. The president later told The New York Times that it was a “minor” malady and that he could not remember which foot had been injured.

A former “star athlete” in high school, whose friends say could have played baseball professionally, Trump was miraculously deemed medically unfit. Free of military service, Trump was then able to focus on a lifestyle as the bachelor son of a millionaire real estate developer.

Advertisement:

Thirty years after Trump avoided the draft, he told Howard Stern that his own “personal” Vietnam had been avoiding STIs during the 1980s in New York.

“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world,” he said. “It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

McCain's running feud with Trump spans back to when the then-presidential candidate dismissed the notion that he should respect McCain's military service as a decorated pilot.

Advertisement:

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

In 1967, McCain was shot down over Northern Vietnam during a bombing raid, breaking both his arms and right leg while ejecting from his plane. He spent the next five years in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” prison camp, where he was repeatedly tortured and spent two years in solitary confinement. The scars remain with McCain today. He is unable to raise either of his arms above his shoulders. Trump has reportedly never apologized to McCain for the remarks.

Advertisement: