President Trump mocked Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on Twitter Wednesday morning while in Vietnam to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Hours before his face-to-face meeting with Kim, Trump took aim at Blumenthal over his past misrepresentations about his military service.
“I have now spent more time in Vietnam than Da Nang Dick Blumenthal, the third rate Senator from Connecticut (how is Connecticut doing?),” Trump tweeted.{mosads}
“His war stories of his heroism in Vietnam were a total fraud – he was never even there,” he added. “We talked about it today with Vietnamese leaders!”
Trump has often referred to the senator as “Da Nang Dick.”
Blumenthal came under fire several years ago after offering false characterizations of his military service during the Vietnam War, including saying that he “served in Vietnam.”
The senator received at least five draft deferments before serving stateside in the Marine Corps Reserve, The New York Times reported in 2010.
Blumenthal apologized at the time, saying he had not “been as clear or precise as I should have been about my service in the Marine Corps Reserves.”
A spokeswoman for Blumenthal said that his office generally declines “to waste time engaging with Trump’s brazen lies about Senator Blumenthal.”
“Nothing new here,” the spokeswoman said. “But the American people should be concerned about the President of the United States squandering time and energy during sensitive negotiations with a serious nuclear threat peddling falsehoods about a political critic.”
Trump is in Hanoi this week to meet with Kim about denuclearization negotiations for the second time in his presidency.
— This report was updated at 11:33 a.m.