President Donald Trump hailed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war hero” — and suggested he deserves the same acclaim.
Trump made the comments in an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin, a staunch Israel advocate, that was aired on Tuesday.
The president praised the Israeli leader as a “good man” as he discussed working with Netanyahu to free the remaining hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Referencing how Netanyahu faces calls to be prosecuted on war crime charges, Trump continued: “He’s in there fighting, they’re trying to put him in jail on top of everything else, how about that? He’s a war hero because we worked together. He’s a war hero. I guess I am too.”
Trump added that “nobody cares, but I am too. I sent those planes,” a reference to U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June.
Trump has lately attempted to cast himself as a global peacemaker who has ended six wars, though his claims are contested.
In the interview, the president complained about not getting enough credit for ordering the Iran strikes, nor for his more recent interventions around the world.
Trump said: “I’ve settled six wars, and we did Iran, and I wiped out their total nuclear capability, which they would have used against Israel in two seconds if they had the chance.”
Trump, 79, has never fought in a war or served in the military, and famously received five deferments from the draft during the Vietnam War.
He was initially allowed to sit out with educational deferments and, ultimately, a medical exemption because of “bone spurs.”
In 2018, the New York Times reported that the two daughters of a Queens podiatrist claimed that their late father diagnosed the future president with bone spurs as a favor to his landlord, Trump’s father, Fred Trump.
Trump joked to Howard Stern in 1997 that the numerous women he slept with during his single years constituted his “personal Vietnam” because of the risks he faced catching sexually transmitted diseases.
The president has also taken a dim view of politicians who are hailed as war heroes.
In 2015, Trump criticized the military record of late Sen. John McCain, a prisoner of war during Vietnam, contending, “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), an Air Force veteran, criticized Trump’s latest comments.
“You can like what he’s done. That’s fine. I hope he gets a resolution in Ukraine,” he told CNN on Tuesday. “But to put himself on the same level of people that have actually gone out and served this country, not claimed bone spurs, is an offense to anybody who served.”
