WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s posthumous slam on Sen. John McCain flips reality on its head when it comes to who gave veterans the…
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s posthumous slam on Sen. John McCain flips reality on its head when it comes to who gave veterans the option to see a private doctor at public expense.
“McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets,” Trump said Wednesday. “I got it done.”
Actually, McCain got it done.
Trump routinely takes full credit for enacting the Choice program, ignoring the fact that it was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2014. This time, his boast came as part of a broad-brush denunciation of McCain, the senator from Arizona, Vietnam war naval aviator and tortured prisoner of war who died in August of brain cancer.
TRUMP: “The vets were on my side because I got the job done. I got Choice and I got accountability.… For many decades, they couldn’t get it done. It was never done. I got it. Five months ago, I got it done. Choice.” — remarks at an Army tank factory in Lima, Ohio.
THE FACTS: What Trump got done was an expansion of the program achieved by McCain and Sen. Bernie Sanders, most prominent among the lawmakers who advanced the legislation signed by President Barack Obama.
McCain was a co-sponsor of the 2014 legislation to overhaul the Department of Veterans Affairs following the scandal at VA’s medical center in Phoenix, where some veterans died while waiting months for appointments for medical care.
