The son of former 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain has criticized Donald Trump’s behavior during his visit to Arlington Cemetery. A recent Democratic enlistee, he says he’ll vote for Kamala Harris.
The break is complete. The son of former 2008 Republican presidential candidate and late Senator John McCain, Jimmy McCain, assured American channel CNN on Tuesday, September 3 that he would vote not for Donald Trump but for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Despite his father’s political past and his family’s conservative tradition, Jimmy McCain had already distanced himself from the Republican camp and Donald Trump. Especially since the latter had declared that his father, who died in 2018, was an “idiot” and did not deserve the status of war hero because he had been captured during the Vietnam War. Comments that Jimmy McCain says he will “never be able to forgive”.
He had then decided to leave the Republican camp and called himself an independent. Until in recent weeks, he changed his voter registration to become a Democrat. He plans to vote for Kamala Harris on November 5 and to “get involved in every way possible” to support her campaign.
“It was a violation”
The final blow? The Republican billionaire’s recent visit to Arlington Military Cemetery on August 26, where some 400,000 veterans and several generations of the McCain family are buried. Donald Trump was there for a ceremony honoring the 13 soldiers killed during the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan in 2021.
As his campaign team sought to take photos of the event, an altercation broke out with an Arlington employee. The latter was “brusquely pushed,” according to the US Army, for trying to enforce a federal law prohibiting all political activity within the cemetery grounds. Photos and videos of Donald Trump, all smiles, alongside the relatives of fallen soldiers were released. The British media outlet The Guardian reports that the background shows the graves of other soldiers whose families have not given their consent.
“It leaves me speechless,” Jimmy McCain, who served in the Army for 17 years and is now an intelligence officer, told CNN.
“These men and women who are lying there have no choice” to serve as a backdrop for a political campaign, he lamented. “It was a violation.”
“An experience that Donald Trump did not have”
For the son of the former Republican senator, the Arlington episode and his reference to fallen soldiers as “losers” reveal Donald Trump’s insecurities. “A lot of these men and women who served their country chose to do something bigger than themselves,” Jimmy McCain said. “They woke up one morning, signed on the dotted line, raised their right hand and chose to serve their country. And that’s an experience that Donald Trump hasn’t had. And I think that’s something he thinks about a lot.”
While other members of the McCain family have distanced themselves from the former president—including Jimmy McCain’s mother, Cindy, who supported candidate Joe Biden in 2020, and his sister Meghan—none, except Jimmy, have publicly abandoned the Republican Party.
