The youngest son of the late Republican senator John McCain—whose war record was disparaged by Donald Trump—revealed that he is now a registered Democrat and plans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election.
First Lieutenant Jimmy McCain announced his decision in an exclusive interview with CNN published on Tuesday, September 3, during which he also criticized the former President and his campaign staffers’ alleged behavior at Arlington National Cemetery last week, which he called a “violation.”
“Show respect and leave. It doesn’t need to be videoed,” McCain, an intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment of the National Guard, told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
He added, “The point of Arlington Cemetery is to go and show respect for the men and women who have given their lives to this country. When you make it political, you take away the respect of the people who are there.”
According to NPR, on Monday, August 26, a cemetery official was reprimanded for preventing Trump’s campaign team from filming and taking photographs in an off-limits area of the grounds called Section 60, where “service members killed in action in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom” are buried, per the cemetery’s website.
The Trump campaign claimed it received permission from the families of fallen service members to film, but McCain countered, “These men and women who are lying in the ground there have no choice.”
“I just think that for anyone who’s spent a lot of time in uniform, they understand inherently that it’s not about you there,” he said. “It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country.”
Trump’s reputation for disdaining military personnel began during his first presidential run in 2016 when he said that the former GOP presidential candidate and Arizona senator—who died in 2018—did not deserve his war hero status because he had been captured during the Vietnam War. He has since been reported to have called U.S. soldiers buried at a World War I cemetery in France “suckers” and “losers” and questioned the value of the Congressional Medal of Honor, generally awarded for acts of military heroism.
McCain, who was previously an independent, said, “Hearing things [from Trump] like, he was a loser because he was captured—I don’t think I could ever overlook that.”
“I feel that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz embody a group of people that will help make this country better, that will take us forward. That’s really what matters at the end of the day,” he said.