John McCain’s Son Says He’s Voting for Harris After Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery Incident

In the wake of an incident at Arlington National Cemetery last week, wherein members of Donald Trump’s campaign allegedly got into a physical and verbal altercation with a cemetery official*, First Lieutenant Jimmy McCain, son of the late senator John McCain, has announced he is voting for Kamala Harris this November and will “get involved in any way” he can to help her chances.

Speaking to CNN, McCain said he viewed the cemetery incident—which reportedly had to do with the Trump campaign trying to film and photograph in a restricted area—as a “violation.” McCain, who has served in the military for 17 years, told the outlet: “It just blows me away. These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” of whether to be part of a political campaign. “I just think that for anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently—that it’s not about you there. It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country.”

McCain has been moving away from the Republican Party for some time now, having been registered as an independent and, as of several weeks ago, a Democrat. But it appears that it was the Arlington National Cemetery incident that pushed him to decide to actually vote for Harris. Noting that the episode, and the Trump campaign’s response**, represent a new low when it comes to Trump’s lack of respect for fallen soldiers, McCain opined that the ex-president’s attitude comes from insecurities about not having served himself. (Trump famously got out of going to Vietnam due to bone spurs.) “Many of these men and women, who served their country, chose to do something greater than themselves,” McCain said. “They woke up one morning, they signed on the dotted line, they put their right hand up, and they chose to serve their country. And that’s an experience that Donald Trump has not had. And I think that might be something that he thinks about a lot.”

Trump spent many years publicly attacking John McCain—both before and after the GOP senator and 2008 presidential hopeful died. In 2015, while discussing McCain, Trump declared: “I like people who weren’t captured.” (McCain spent five years in a North Vietnamese prison.) The former president also:

Repeatedly attacked McCain for refusing to help him gut the Affordable Care Act
Complained that he didn’t get a “thank-you” for giving McCain “the kind of funeral that he wanted,” even though Trump’s approval was not actually necessary for said funeral
Mocked McCain’s college academic record
Appeared to suggest McCain is rotting in hell
Called McCain a “lousy” presidential candidate
Reportedly described McCain as a “loser” and “not a war hero”

The attacks on McCain are, of course, part of a broader pattern of denigrating soldiers in general. According to reporting by The Atlantic, which was later confirmed by Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly, the ex-president called Marines who died at Belleau Wood during World War I “suckers” and dubbed soldiers buried at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery “losers.” Though Trump has denied the aforementioned remarks, in 2016 he publicly went after a Gold Star family, and in 2020 he suggested a group of Gold Star families might have infected him with COVID-19—despite the fact that he’d reportedly already tested positive for the virus before meeting with them. Most recently, he declared the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an award given to civilians for exceptional contributions, to be “much better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor, an award reserved for military members, because the latter recipients are wounded or dead. So you can kind of see why the younger McCain wouldn’t want to put him back in the White House.

*A spokesperson for the campaign denied the physical aspect of the story, but the Army said in a statement that the worker was definitely “pushed aside.”

** A campaign manager for Trump called Army officials “hacks” and said the incident in question was “100% a manufactured story.”

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