President Trump continues to pile on criticism of the late Sen. John McCain, complaining on Wednesday during a speech in Ohio that the Arizona senator‘
President Trump continues to pile on criticism of the late Sen. John McCain, complaining on Wednesday during a speech in Ohio that the Arizona senator’s family never thanked him for the Vietnam War hero’s funeral, which involved large ceremonies in Washington, D. C.
„I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve,“ Trump told a crowd at an Army tank manufacturing plant in Lima. „I don’t care about this. I didn’t get [a] thank you. That’s okay. We sent him on the way, but I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.“
Trump was the only living president not to attend McCain’s September 2018 service at the National Cathedral, during which several speakers made not-so-veiled comparisons between the current commander-in-chief and the 2008 GOP presidential nominee who had been tortured for over five years after his plane was shot down over Vietnam. McCain’s daughter Meghan said during her emotional eulogy that „the America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great“ — an allusion to the president’s campaign slogan.
Trump’s latest comments are only the latest salvo of the past few days, continuing a years-long feud with McCain, even from beyond the grave, and he’s irritating several Republican senators.
Just hours before Trump’s latest hits against McCain, Senate Veterans‘ Affairs Committee Chairman Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., said that the president’s continued slights against the Navy veteran and his Vietnam War service are „deplorable.“
„It will be deplorable seven months from now if he says it again. And I will continue to speak out, because there’s one thing we’ve got to do — you may not like immigration, you may not like this, you may not like that, you may be a Republican, you may be a Democrat, but we’re all Americans,“ Isakson said during an interview with Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Political Rewind with Bill Nigut. „There aren’t Democratic casualties and Republican casualties on the battlefield — there are American casualties. And we should never reduce the service that people give to this country, including the offering of their own life, to anything but political fodder in Washington, D. C.“
Isakson said he was just keeping a promise he made shortly after the Arizona senator’s death to defend McCain’s honor and military record from anyone who would dare to besmirch it — even the president.
„If my kids ever said John McCain was never a war hero…they’d have a serious conversation with me, and I would have it with them,“ Isakson told GPB.
Yet, that is the language Trump has continued to use about McCain, who died in August from an aggressive form of brain cancer. Over the weekend, Trump revived his criticism, tweeting about McCain’s involvement in alerting the FBI to a controversial Russia dossier, the subject of recent news reports.
