Washington: It was the spring of 1968 and Donald Trump had it good. He was 21 years old and handsome with a full head of hair. He avoided the Vietnam War draft on his way to earning an Ivy League degree. He was fond of fancy dinners, beautiful women and outrageous clubs. Most important, he had a job in his father’s real estate company and a brain bursting with money-making ideas that would make him a billionaire.
“When I graduated from college, I had a net worth of perhaps $US200,000 ($271,000)”, he said in his 1987 autobiography “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” written with Tony Schwartz. “I had my eye on Manhattan.”
Nearly 13,000 kilometres away, John McCain sat in a tiny, squalid North Vietnamese prison cell. The Navy pilot’s body was broken from a plane crash, starvation, botched operations and months of torture.
As Trump was preparing to take Manhattan, McCain was trying to relearn how to walk.
The stark contrast in their fortunes was thrown into sharp relief on Saturday when Trump belittled McCain during a campaign speech in Iowa. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain. “He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said sarcastically. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
McCain famously followed his father and grandfather – both admirals – into the Navy.
Growing up in Queens, Trump’s role models were more … theatrical.
