Donald Trump’s Bitter Feud with John McCain Could Come Back to Bite Him
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
By: Logan Phillips
Date: October 16th
Arizona is one of the most tightly contested battleground states in the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden’s campaign is betting that Cindy McCain’s recent endorsement could play a decisive role as voters make up their minds in the closing weeks of the campaign.
Most Americans know that Donald Trump and John McCain didn’t exactly have the warmest of relationships. However, chances are few voters know about Joe Biden and John McCain’s close friendship. Months before McCain died from the very same cancer that killed Joe's son Beau, McCain asked the former Vice President to be one of his eulogizers.
Biden readily obliged. Standing in front of both the McCain family and hundreds of Americans who came to mourn the Senator’s passing, he said, “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democrat. And I loved John McCain. I have had the dubious honor over the years of giving some eulogies for fine women and men that I’ve admired. But this one’s hard….”
“It was a great friendship,” Biden said, “that transcended whatever political differences we had or later developed because, above all, we understood the same thing. All politics is personal. It's all about trust. I trusted John with my life, and I would, and I think he would trust me with his.”
When they first met, John McCain was working as a Navy Liaison to the Senate, and Biden had recently become America’s youngest Senator. McCain was already a national figure because of the incredible resilience and unselfishness he showed after being captured as a prisoner of war by the Vietcong. While McCain sat in prison in Hanoi, his father, a U.S. Navy Admiral, was put in charge of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater.
The Vietcong tried to release John McCain early from prison as both a diplomatic move and to show McCain’s fellow soldiers that elite officers weren’t willing to go through the same suffering as their men. John McCain refused to oblige, insisting that he would only accept release so long as every man captured before him be released first.
The breath of that sacrifice, and his continued refusal to accept early release, is stunning when you consider how he was treated over the coming months. He was beaten brutally once every two hours by the Vietcong. He suffered under round the clock torture. For two years he was kept in solitary confinement. After five years of imprisonment, he was finally released, along with 108 other prisoners of war. He returned to America as a war hero.
McCain, at right, in 1965. Photo Credit: Library of Congress
Like millions of other Americans, Joe Biden was deeply moved by John McCain's story, and wanted to get to know him personally. He asked McCain to accompany him on a trip with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden and McCain became friends as they traveled around the world and engaged in diplomacy on behalf of the United States. Biden leaned closely on McCain for his advice and judgment before meeting with foreign leaders. These were the first of dozens of trips the two would take after McCain himself became a Senator ten years later.
The contrast because Biden and Trump’s respective relationships with McCain couldn’t be more extreme. Unlike most of the GOP Senators that criticized Trump harshly in 2016, but fell in line quickly after he became President, John McCain seemed immune to Donald Trump’s efforts to charm – and pressure - him into silent and steadfast support. Things weren’t any different when they first encountered each other in 1993, decades before Trump’s formal entrance into politics. According to top McCain aide Mark Salter in his new book, “The Luckiest Man”, Donald Trump once waited outside the Senate doors for John McCain to walk through, so that he could pull him aside and lobby him directly.
John McCain couldn’t have been less interested in Trump. "Trump waited to buttonhole him,” Salter wrote. “McCain walked briskly past the casino owner, pretending not to notice as Trump tried to get his attention. Frustrated, Trump shouted after him, 'I gave money to your campaign!’ Looking over his shoulder, McCain yelled back, 'Oh yeah? See what that will get you.'"
Perhaps this was on Donald Trump’s mind in 2015 when McCain’s name came up in an interview just a few weeks into his presidential campaign. Donald Trump’s face flushed with anger as he said, “He's not a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured."
While the comments became the central focus of national news networks, Salter claims that they never bothered McCain, who suffered far worse as a prisoner than any insults Trump could tweet out. 'All he did was get people to talk about what a hero I am all weekend. That's not my problem, it's his".
That might have been the height of their relationship. When Trump became President, McCain was one of his fiercest Republican critics, especially on issues of foreign policy and immigration. President Trump expects loyalty from all Republicans serving office, but he would never get it from McCain, who maintained his maverick politics to his dying days. In what will assuredly go down as one of the great ironies of American history, John McCain protected President Obama’s signature accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, torpedoing Trump’s attempts to repeal it in dramatic fashion.
Even after McCain’s death in August of 2018, Trump’s anger has shown no signs of abating. He reportedly lashed out in fury at his aides when he found out that someone had lowered the American flag on the White House grounds to honor John McCain. While Trump denies it, this report hardly strains credibility, considering the President has continued to launch unprompted Twitter attacks on John McCain more than two years later. This happened as recently as September.
Cindy McCain explains her Endorsement of Joe Biden to Jake Tapper on CNN
The assaults on McCain’s character and military service have almost assuredly done little to help the President win Arizona and have likely contributed to his struggles with longtime republican suburbanites and seniors that are increasingly open to supporting Joe Biden.
It certainly hasn’t impressed Cindy McCain, John McCain’s wife, who had never endorsed a Democratic Presidential candidate before 2020. Now, she’s become a central part of the Biden Campaign's closing argument. She recently cut an advertisement, where she talked about the common values that Biden and McCain champion.
“They developed the kind of friendship you don't see too often… They fought like hell on the floor, and then they'd go get lunch together. Because they always put their friendship and the country first…Joe Biden will always fight for the American people. Just like John did”
McCain still clearly holds sway over many Arizonans, and even became popular with Democrats and Independents in the state over the last few years of his life. However, in an indication of the extent of President Trump’s sway over the modern Republican party, a 2018 poll showed that many Republicans in the state soured on McCain because of his contentious relationship with Trump.
Nonetheless, it’s exactly this type of theatrics, meanness, and inability to let anything go that have so greatly irked so many voters that normally vote for the GOP, but are increasingly open to voting for Democrats for the first time in their lives. Biden’s campaign is hoping to reach them through Cindy McCain, in ads that are airing frequently not just in Arizona, but across the nation.
At the very least, Donald Trump certainly isn’t depriving them of material to use against him. In one of the few moments of 2020 that surprised absolutely no one, Donald Trump responded to the news of the endorsement by personally insulting Cindy McCain on Twitter.
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