The enlisted son of former Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain has entered the political arena with an official endorsement for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Jimmy McCain told CNN he recently changed his voter registration to Democrat and plans to cast his ballot against Trump.
McCain said the former president deeply offended him by visiting Arlington National Cemetery last week, where an altercation occurred when people with the GOP nominee took photos in a part of the sacred burial ground where that’s not allowed.
“These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice,” McCain said of Trump’s unofficial campaign stop.
While his war hero father was buried at the United States Naval Academy Cemetery in Maryland after he died in 2018, McCain’s grandfather and great grandfather were laid to rest at Arlington, according to CNN.
McCain became a Marine in 2006 when he was 17 years old and fought in Iraq a year later. In 2014, he served in Afghanistan, according to his McCain Institute bio. He now serves in U.S. Army Intelligence.
Insulting service members — his old GOP political rival John McCain in particular — is nothing new to Trump.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said at a 2015 event for conservatives when asked about the former Navy pilot who spent more than five years in a Viet Cong prison camp. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
McCain told CNN he still recalls Trump making those remarks about his dad.
“I’ve never forgotten it,” he said. “To hear those things said about him, I could never forgive.”
McCain’s political pundit sister, Meghan McCain, has also expressed a distaste for Trump, but stopped short of jumping parties to support a Democratic candidate. Her little brother said he’ll “get involved in any way” he can to help Harris.
Numerous news outlets, along with retired four-star Marine general and Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, quoted Trump calling soldiers who died at war “suckers” and “losers.”
Trump, who has denied that claim, also said his team didn’t get into an altercation with a guard at Arlington National Cemetery who asked that no pictures be taken.
The 78-year-old presidential candidate received five draft deferments to avoid serving in the military during the war in Vietnam.
