Trump On McCain: ‘I Gave Him The Kind of Funeral He Wanted’
President Donald Trump’s bizarre, one-sided feud with Senator John McCain — who has been dead for more than seven months — continued Wednesday.
After several days of tweets in which he ripped McCain for voting against a plan to repeal Obamacare in 2017 — and for McCain’s supposed role in the spreading of the Steele dossier — the president addressed the subject again as he gave a speech on Wednesday. During said speech, the president appeared to attack the late senator, or perhaps his family, for not thanking him for authorizing McCain’s state funeral.
Per CBS News, Trump — while speaking at a tank plant in Lima, Ohio, on Wednesday — said of the late Arizona senator that “I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve. I don’t care about this, I didn’t get thank you, that’s okay, we sent him on the way.”
In accordance with the wishes of McCain’s family, Trump did not attend the senator’s funeral on September 1, 2018. Trump’s absence was noted from the pulpit at the National Cathedral from several speakers, with varying degrees of subtlety. The New Yorker described the funeral service as “The Biggest Resistance Meeting Yet.”
Trump was speaking before what was described as a “pro-military crowd” which, per CBS News, went silent as the president ripped McCain. McCain had served in the Navy, and was a prisoner of war for more than five years in Vietnam.
#BREAKING: Trump says he gave McCain “the funeral he wanted,” complains he “didn’t get a thank you” https://t.co/2Euufb5Cgo pic.twitter.com/i08j9EzrmZ
— The Hill (@thehill) March 20, 2019
On Tuesday, at a press meeting with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Trump was asked about his weekend tweets. Said tweets included several shots at the late Arizona senator. Trump, per The Inquisitr, criticized McCain again.
“I’m very unhappy that he didn’t repeal and replace Obamacare,” Trump said from the White House. “He campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years, and then he got to a vote, and he said thumbs down. Our country would have saved a trillion dollars, and we would have had great health care… plus there were other things. I was never a fan of John McCain, and I never will be.”
McCain, who had voted for various repeals of Obamacare over the years, voted no on what was known as “skinny repeal” in July of 2017. Passage of that bill would not have meant the direct repeal of President Barack Obama’s law, but in fact would have created a committee to reconcile the House and Senate versions. It’s far from certain that any version of the bill would have passed. That was, however, the Trump administration’s most recent attempt at an Obamacare repeal.
