Dear Commons Community,
It is about time that two Senate Republicans have called out President Trump for his attacks on former Senator John McCain.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, denounced Donald Trump yesterday over the president’s latest attacks. In an interview with CNN in January, Romney pledged to make his disagreements with the president known.
“Where I disagree, I’ll point that out,” Romney said, and he got that opportunity yesterday. Romney took to Twitter to write that he couldn’t “understand why” Trump would go after McCain “once again,” referencing a comment Trump made about not being “a fan” of the Arizona Republican after tweeting over the weekend about the “stains” on his career.
“I can’t understand why the President would, once again, disparage a man as exemplary as my friend John McCain: heroic, courageous, patriotic, honorable, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, empathetic, and driven by duty to family, country, and God,” Romney’s tweet read.
During an Oval Office appearance with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Trump railed against McCain’s 2017 Senate vote against a Republican bill that would have repealed the Affordable Care Act.
“I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be,” Trump said of McCain, who died of cancer on Aug. 25, 2018.
Trump also went after McCain over the weekend, accusing him of sharing a copy of the Steele dossier on the billionaire’s ties to Russia with the media before the 2016 presidential election.
“He spends his weekend obsessing over great men because — he knows it and I know it and all of you know it — he will never be a great man. My father was his kryptonite in life and he is his kryptonite in death,” McCain said Monday on “The View,” adding, “Your life is spent on your weekends not with your family, not with your friends, but obsessing, obsessing over great men you could never live up to. That tells you everything you need to know about his pathetic life right now.”
Sen. McCain’s longtime friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who had been, until yesterday muted in his criticism of Trump, also took issue with the president’s latest comments.
“John McCain is an American hero. He stepped forward to serve his nation. He risked his life. He spent five-and-a-half years in horrendous conditions as a prisoner of war. He’s one of the most consequential senators in the history of the body. Nothing will ever change that,” Graham told the Washington Post on Capitol Hill. “When he received the dossier, he turned it over to the FBI, it’s what he should have done. He didn’t turn it over to the press, other people did. So he’s my friend. I told President Trump that when it comes to John McCain, I think he acted responsibly. He’s an American hero and nothing will ever change that in my eyes. I want to help this president. I want him to be successful. I’ll help him where I can, but push back when I need to. When it comes to criticizing Sen. McCain and his service, I think that’s a huge mistake.”
More Republicans need to show the American people that they are not puppets of the president. Up until yesterday, it was only McCain’s daughter defending her father.
Tony
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
