Exclusive: The son of John McCain criticizes Trump's visit to Arlington as a "violation" that used the cemetery as a backdrop for his campaign.
First Lieutenant Jimmy McCain believes that he saw a "violation" when former President Donald Trump staged a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery last week.
In an exclusive interview with CNN this week, the youngest son of the late Sen. John McCain said that he had already begun to drift away from the Republican Party a few weeks prior. He changed his voter registration to Democrat and intends to support Kamala Harris in November.
However, he is now making his first public comments against Trump in response to the former president's actions at the revered burial site of multiple generations of McCain family members, including his great-grandfather and grandpa.
McCain, who has spent 17 years in the service, told CNN, "It just blows me away." The man stated, "These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice" but to serve as the setting for a political campaign.
Anyone who has spent a lot of time in their uniform, in my opinion, simply naturally understands that it's not about them there. It concerns these individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation.
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 to have changed his political affiliation from years of being registered as an independent to Democrat a few weeks ago. He says 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 past GOP presidential contender, this is a big step. Jimmy McCain has officially deserted the Republican Party, but other McCain family members have distanced themselves from Trump. These include his sister Meghan and mother Cindy, who supported then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020.
Even after criticizing Trump harshly, Meghan McCain said last week that she would still not support Harris. She wrote, "I've been a generational conservative 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 recently, 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" since he was imprisoned in Vietnam and that he was a "loser"—were extremely damaging to him personally, they weren't over boundaries politically.
McCain stated, "One thing about John McCain is that he chose a public life." Therefore, it is really within the scope of his job description to attack him.
However, the younger McCain believes that Trump's disregard for the fallen has reached a completely new level, as seen by the Arlington incident and the way the campaign has responded to it. Furthermore, he thinks it is a result of Trump's personal anxieties about not having been drafted.
McCain stated, "A lot of these men and women who served their country decided to do something greater than themselves." One morning, they opted to serve their nation, placed their right hand up, signed on the dotted line, and got up. And Donald Trump has not had that experience. And I believe he may consider that a topic of frequent thought.
McCain made it clear that he is speaking for himself and that the US Army does not share his opinions. 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 recently returned from a seven-month assignment to Tower 22, a tiny US facility on the border between Jordan and Syria.
He claims that when he saw Trump posing in front of gravestones last Monday, he thought of the three US service men who were murdered on the site in a drone assault by insurgents supported by Iran, only a few weeks prior to his arrival.
Following a wreath-laying ceremony on Monday at Kabul airport's Abbey Gate in remembrance of the 13 US military personnel who died there in 2021, Trump paid a visit to the cemetery. The visit was documented by his campaign, which resulted in a confrontation with a graveyard employee who tried to stop Trump's group from taking pictures and videos at the location of the most recent US casualties' grave. The Army claims that doing so is against Defense Department policy, federal law, and Army rules.
Politicians are prohibited from holding political events at Arlington, and Trump is not the first to do so. In fact, when he issued a campaign ad using a video of himself strolling through a graveyard more than 20 years ago, John McCain said he had made "a very bad mistake."
But Trump and his team haven't released a mea culpa like that. Instead, a cemetery employee who objected to the action and subsequently released video of it said that they were "abruptly pushed aside" by the US Army. Chris LaCivita, one of Trump's campaign strategists, referred to the Army as "hacks" and declared that the narrative was "100% manufactured."
The family members of several of the military soldiers who were killed at Abbey Gate made audio remarks available to Trump's campaign over the weekend, claiming that they had invited Trump visit their loved ones' graves. However, additional gravestones were also visible in the campaign's TikTok video of the occasion, which included the grave of an Army Special Forces member who committed himself. The victim's family said they did not grant the campaign permission to record the man's suicide.
McCain, for his part, is getting ready to participate more in this election season. Despite his years of experience working on veteran advocacy issues, he admits that his own recent political change has been quite personal.
McCain remarked, "A lot of people lose that in the minutia. John McCain was my father." "He wasn't John McCain in the sense that the world knows him. The man who cherished me was him. And from the time I could think, I knew one thing about my dad: he was a nice guy who had fulfilled his responsibility. And hearing [from Trump] things like, "He was a loser because he was captured," when I was with him toward the end of his life, I don't believe I could ever get over that.
