Donald Trump, the petulant GOP front-runner and Twitter troll, never served in uniform except when he dressed up on parade at his military academy.

You might have thought avoiding military service, even in the reserves or National Guard, while the U.S. was at war, would have instilled in Trump a more modest regard for his own courage and patriotism and a deeper respect for the sacrifice of those who did. You would be wrong. The Donald doesn’t do modesty, and his shortcomings as a patriot don’t inform his self-awareness any more than his many business failures have.

By his own admission, the closest he came to combat was his sexual adventurism in the 1980s, when HIV/AIDS was claiming the lives of better men than him. It was his “personal Vietnam,” he told shock jock Howard Stern in 1997. “I felt like a great and very brave soldier.”

While Americans with little wealth and few family connections were dodging bullets, mortars and booby traps in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, our Sergeant York of well-appointed bedrooms was bravely jumping in harm’s way, armed only with the aphrodisiac of his daddy’s money.