Former President Donald Trump returned to mocking the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, alluding to the former prisoner-of-war’s broken limbs to explain Republicans’ failure to pass health care legislation.
Speaking to supporters Saturday in Newton, Iowa, Trump noted McCain’s 2018 vote that sank GOP efforts to repeal former President Barack Obama’s signature domestic law, known as Obamacare.
McCain, R-Ariz., memorably traveled across the country while battling deadly brain cancer to allow a vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act, but then voted against his party’s plan with a dramatic thumbs-down gesture.
He later said he did so because the hasty effort had not gone through the usual legislative process.
“Obamacare is a catastrophe. Nobody talks about it. You know, without John McCain, we would have had it done. John McCain, for some reason, couldn’t get his arm up that day. Remember?” Trump said, pointing his thumb down as McCain did. “He goes like that. That was the end of that.”
Former President Donald Trump addresses the audience during a campaign event Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024, at the DMACC Conference Center in Newton.
The mocking reference to McCain in Iowa was only Trump’s latest in a feud with the former GOP presidential nominee. McCain’s legacy is now largely shunned by his party, and his supporters may have thwarted Republican elections in the years since his death.
By venting his contempt for McCain, Trump pushes away a small but potentially critical bloc that again could play a role in settling elections in Arizona later this year.
Meghan McCain reprimanded Trump in a social media post after his broadside.
“My dad was an American hero. An icon. A patriot that will be remembered throughout history,” she wrote on X. “I cannot buy a bagel without someone approaching me about how much they loved and miss him.
“Trump is a piece of (expletive), election denying, huckster whose own wife won’t campaign with him.”
Trump’s attack came on the third anniversary of the riot at the U.S. Capitol by a mob supporting his efforts to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
McCain’s home state of Arizona figured prominently in Trump’s loss: The one-time red state that McCain never lost was Biden’s narrowest victory in the country.
Aided by the endorsement of McCain’s widow, Cindy McCain, Biden carried Arizona, in part because Trump underperformed in traditionally Republican areas across Maricopa County.
That pattern repeated in 2022 when Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, a Trump loyalist, narrowly lost similarly after memorably antagonizing McCain’s supporters.
Lake told “McCain Republicans” to “get the hell out” and said, “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?”
John McCain: an American story
Trump has never moved past his differences with McCain.
While McCain was alive, he and Trump battled over many issues. Most prominently, in 2015 Trump, who did not serve in Vietnam, mocked McCain’s POW record.
Trump said McCain, a former Navy aviator who was shot down in 1967, was “a war hero because he was captured” and that he liked “people that weren’t captured.” The North Vietnamese held McCain as a POW for more than five years.
Trump relentlessly attacked McCain over his views on immigration, veterans’ issues and other topics. For his part, McCain eventually withdrew his endorsement of Trump’s 2016 presidential bid after a 2005 recording surfaced that revealed Trump trivializing sexual assault, using vulgar terms about women and making other misogynistic comments.
On the night Trump won Arizona by 3.5 percentage points, McCain won his sixth and final Senate race by 12.
In 2019, Trump still brooded about McCain and his vote on the ACA.
Trump said that McCain “told us hours before that he was going to repeal and replace, and then for some reason — I think I understand the reason — he ended up” going against the measure.
“And frankly, had we even known that, I think we would’ve gotten the vote, because we could have gotten somebody else,” Trump said. “I think that’s disgraceful. Plus, there are other things. I was never a fan of John McCain, and I never will be.”
Last year, Trump penned a coffee table book that returned to his hatred of McCain. In it, Trump said McCain’s funerals and memorial services lasted too long.
Trump wrote that he “never warmed to him” and “never felt good about anybody having anything to do with John McCain and never will, even despite the fact that at their request, I gave him the world’s longest funeral, 11 days. Much like his wars, it never ended.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Trump and McCain: Former president mocks late senator