A 12.26 N.Y. Times story by Steve Eder doesn’t offer irrefutable proof that a Queens podiatrist got a 22 year-old Donald Trump got out of military service by writing a bogus letter to the draft board about Trump suffering from bone spurs, but it strongly suggests this.

The story is titled “Did a Queens Podiatrist Help Donald Trump Avoid Vietnam?”

“A possible explanation involves a foot doctor in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, and a suggestion that the diagnosis was granted as a courtesy to the elder Mr. Trump.

“The podiatrist, Dr. Larry Braunstein, died in 2007. But his daughters say their father often told the story of coming to the aid of a young Mr. Trump during the Vietnam War as a favor to his father.

“’I know it was a favor,’ said one daughter, Dr. Elysa Braunstein, 56, who along with her sister, Sharon Kessel, 53, shared the family’s account for the first time publicly when contacted by The New York Times.

“Elysa Braunstein said the implication from her father was that Mr. Trump did not have a disqualifying foot ailment. ‘But did he examine him? I don’t know,’ she said.

Basic Vietnam-era realities for men of conscription age: Anybody who was able to weasel out of Vietnam service by any strategy, did so. Nobody thought twice about it. Volunteers like Oliver Stone aside, that war was mostly fought by blue-collar guys who didn’t have a scam or a strategy that would allow them to wiggle out. No late teen or 20something male with any kind of educated background wanted to fight in Vietnam. It was an evil war or at the very least a criminally misguided one. The full might of a superpower attempting to crush an agrarian nation — a peasant society just trying to rid itself of colonialists and imperialists — was appalling to anyone with a brain.

Young Donald Trump was just the fortunate son of a rich guy who got out through what sounds like fraudulent means, but everybody was trying to do the same thing.