“It just blows me away,” McCain, who has served in the military for 17 years, told CNN.
It’s a significant move for the son of a former GOP presidential candidate and Arizona senator.
Despite her harsh criticisms of Trump, Meghan McCain indicated last week that she would still not endorse Harris.
Jimmy McCain, who enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 17 and now serves as an intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment, had until now deliberately sought to avoid entering the political fray.
“One thing about John McCain is that he chose a public life,” McCain said.
“Many of these men and women, who served their country, chose to do something greater than themselves,” McCain said.
Trump is not the first politician to violate a ban on political activity at Arlington.
In fact, more than 20 years ago, John McCain said he made “a very bad mistake” when he released a campaign ad that featured a clip of him walking through the cemetery.
“John McCain was my father, and a lot of people lose that in the minutia,” McCain said.
“He wasn’t ‘John McCain’ the way he is to the world.
First Lieutenant Donald Trump made a campaign stop at Arlington National Cemetery last week. Jimmy McCain claims to have thought it was a “violation.”. “.
the late Sen’s youngest son. In an exclusive interview with CNN this week, John McCain revealed that he had already begun to drift away from the Republican Party a few weeks prior. He had changed his voter registration to a Democrat and intended to support Kamala Harris in November.
However, he is now making his first public comments about Trump in response to the former president’s actions at the revered burial site of several generations of McCain family members, including his great-grandfather and grandfather.
After serving in the military for 17 years, McCain told CNN, “It just blows me away.”. According to him, “these men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” but to serve as a backdrop for a political campaign.
“I simply believe that anyone who has spent a lot of time in their uniform knows that it’s not about them there. It is about these individuals who, for the sake of their nation, made the ultimate sacrifice. “.
McCain’s choice to come out now is a part of his larger retreat from the Republican Party and the well-known conservatism of his family. He claims that, after years of being registered as an independent, he recently registered as a Democrat. He says that he intends to vote for Kamala Harris in November and that he “would get involved in any way I could” to support her campaign.
For the son of an Arizona senator and former GOP presidential contender, this is a big step. Jimmy McCain is the only member of the McCain family who has openly deserted the Republican Party, though other family members have distanced themselves from Trump, such as his sister Meghan and mother Cindy, who supported then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020.
Meghan McCain said last week she would still not support Harris, even after criticizing Trump harshly. She tweeted, “I’m a generational conservative who has been for my entire life.”.
Jimmy McCain, who joined the Marine Corps at the age of seventeen, is currently assigned to the 158th Infantry Regiment as an intelligence officer. Until now, he had made a conscious effort to stay out of politics. Jimmy McCain thinks that while Trump’s remarks about his father—that he was “not a war hero” because he was captured in Vietnam and that he was a “loser”—were extremely hurtful to him personally, they weren’t beyond bounds politically.
John McCain “selected a public life as one of his attributes,” the senator remarked. Therefore, it is really within the scope of his job description to attack him. “.
What the younger McCain sees as Trump’s disdain for the fallen, however, is elevated to a whole new level by the Arlington incident and the way the campaign has handled it. Furthermore, he thinks that Trump’s own anxieties about not having served are the root of the problem.
McCain stated, “A lot of these men and women who served their country decided to do something greater than themselves.”. “They put their right hand up, signed on the .ted line, and made the decision to serve their country when they woke up one morning. And Donald Trump lacks that kind of experience. And it occurs to me that he may think about that a lot. “.
McCain made it clear that his opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Army. In 2022, McCain was commissioned as an officer in the US Army’s intelligence branch.
McCain was especially enraged by the Arlington incident because, at the time of its occurrence, he had just returned from a seven-month assignment to Tower 22, a small US base near the border between Jordan and Syria.
When he saw Trump posing in front of gravestones last Monday, he says he thought of the three US service members who were killed on the base in a drone attack by militants backed by Iran, just weeks before he arrived.
“It was an infraction,” stated McCain. “Those families, that mother, that sister, you see that, it’s a painful experience. “.
Following a wreath-laying ceremony last Monday at Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in honor of the 13 US military personnel who died there in 2021, Trump paid a visit to the cemetery. A dispute erupted between Trump’s entourage and a cemetery employee when the latter tried to stop them from taking pictures and videos in the graveyard area of the recently deceased US soldiers after his campaign recorded the visit. The Army asserts that doing so is against Defense Department directives, federal law, and Army regulations.
There are other politicians who have broken the Arlington ban on political activity besides Trump. Indeed, John McCain acknowledged over two decades ago that he had committed “a very bad mistake” when he released a campaign ad that included a video of him strolling through a cemetery.
However, there has been no such mea culpa from Trump or his campaign. A cemetery employee who objected to the activity and later released video of it was, instead, “abruptly pushed aside” by the US Army and disregarded. Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s campaign managers, referred to the Army as “hacks” and declared that the narrative was “100% manufactured.”. “.
The family members of some of the service members who were killed at Abbey Gate made taped statements available to Trump’s campaign over the weekend, claiming that they had invited Trump to their loved ones’ graves. However, the campaign’s TikTok video of the event featured other gravestones as well, including the one of an Army Special Forces soldier who committed suicide and whose family claimed they did not give the campaign permission to record it.
McCain, for his part, is getting ready to participate more in this election cycle. Although he has long been active in veteran advocacy, he admits that his recent political change has been very personal.
A lot of people forget that John McCain was his father, McCain remarked, “in the details.”. “He wasn’t John McCain in the sense that the world knows him. It was him who was my true love. And the one thing I’d known about my father since I could think was that he was a good man who had fulfilled his responsibility. And I don’t think I could ever forget that I was with him when he was nearing the end of his life and heard things [from Trump] like he was a loser because he was captured. “.
