President Trump’s children, Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), will fight for their father no matter the circumstances, but beefing with a dead war hero is a bridge too far even for the president’s most famous sons.
For some reason, unknown to Satan and the birds that kicked it with the Wicked Witch of the West, the president of people who didn’t owe this tax season has decided to pick a fight with deceased Sen. John McCain.
He’s literally kept McCain’s name in his KFC-grease-saturated mouth or on the tips of his un-Vaselined fingers for the past five days.
Think about that.
For five days the president has been relentlessly bashing a deceased war hero who survived being captured and tortured during the Vietnam War that left him disabled. He would later serve as a beloved Republican senator for Arizona and died last year after a long battle with cancer.
Only a day after Trump told reporters that he was “never a fan of John McCain and I never will be,” Trump doubled down at an Ohio tank manufacturing facility on Wednesday, where he claimed he never received a thank you for “approving” McCain’s funeral service on Sept. 1.
McCain hated the president so much that he literally wrote out a “who can’t attend my funeral” list and it only had three names on it:
- Trump
- Trump
- Trump
From The Washington Post:
In a five-minute diatribe during an appearance at a General Dynamics tank factory in Lima, Ohio, Trump argued that McCain, a lifelong Pentagon booster and former prisoner of war in Vietnam, “didn’t get the job done” for veterans while also grousing that he did not receive proper gratitude for McCain’s funeral last September.
“I gave him the kind of funeral he wanted, which as president I had to approve,” Trump said inaccurately, an apparent reference to allowing the use of military transport to carry McCain’s body to Washington. “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.”
He added, “I have to be honest, I never liked him much. Hasn’t been for me. I’ve really, probably, never will.”
Even the crowd, which was fully pro-Trump, was shocked.
Several Republican senators have come out against the president’s attack against McCain.
Sen. Mitch McConnell got someone on his staff to help him tweet:
“Today and every day I miss my good friend John McCain. It was a blessing to serve alongside a rare patriot and genuine American hero in the Senate. His memory continues to remind me every day that our nation is sustained by the sacrifices of heroes.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could only bring himself to say “I don’t like when [the president] says things about my friend.” But I’m convinced that Trump has a dossier on Graham.
“I think the president’s comments about Sen. McCain hurt him more than they hurt the legacy of Sen. McCain. I’m going to try to continue to help the president,” Graham told reporters in South Carolina.
“My job is to represent the people of South Carolina. They want me to work with the president where I can. I’ve gotten to know the president. We have a good working relationship. I like him,” Graham said.
“I don’t like when he says things about my friend John McCain. The best thing that can happen, I think, for all of us, is to move forward,” he added.
Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson was a little more forceful, calling Trump’s attacks on McCain “deplorable.”
“It’s deplorable what he said,” Isakson told Georgia Public Broadcasting on Wednesday afternoon. “That’s what I said on the floor of the Senate seven months ago. It will be deplorable seven months from now if he says it again and I will continue to speak out.”
So if we are keeping score, capturing and separating Mexican children at the border and keeping them in cages is fine, as is raising taxes for the middle class and funding a goddamn space troop. But bashing a dead war hero is a bridge too far...
Got it?