In fact, a summary of Trump’s draft record — from the National Archives and Records Administration in Missouri and first published by the The Smoking Gun website in 2011 — tells a different story.
Trump’s medical deferment is listed for October 1968, months after he had left Wharton. And despite the campaign’s statement that it was “expected to be short-term,” there is no evidence in the records of it being dropped before the draft lottery in 1969.
The dates suggest the deferment stemmed from a Sept. 17, 1968, draft physical at the Armed Forces Center in New York described in a 1992 book on the businessman by veteran journalist Wayne Barrett. “The baseball-tennis-squash star qualified for a medical deferment,” Barrett writes, but no explanation is given of the cause.
Various news accounts in 2011 also stopped short, and the first mention of bone spurs appears to have come from Trump this past weekend.
The fact that Trump was called for a physical within months after graduating indicates that there was a very real threat of him being drafted — long before the December 1969 lottery. Any deferment was more than “minor” then. And one big question is whether Trump actively sought the deferment by bringing a letter from his own doctor to the physical citing the bone spur problem.
Young men with access to friendly family physicians had this advantage at the time in dealing with draft physicals. Lower-income individuals, with no doctor but health issues bigger than bone spurs, could find themselves approved for military service.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/donald-trump-evades-specifics-on-his-draft-deferment-120330
Trump was playing on his school's baseball and squash teams at the time he was "disabled." It was a common way for the children of the wealthy to dodge service. If you couldn't pull strings to go to the head of the line for the National Guard, you found a doc who would write a disability letter.
I had some foot problems myself, but not so bad that I couldn't serve. So I went when I was called. I don't know if my doc would have written a letter for me or not; it wasn't an honorable thing to do, so I didn't do it.