While controversies have risen regarding what Donald Trump said or didn’t say to parents on service members killed overseas, let me go back to something that happened earlier this week. On Monday night, Senator John McCain talked of the good that comes from the United States playing a leading role in the world:
“‘To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.’”
In a radio show on Tuesday,1 President Trump was asked about Senator McCain’s speech. President Trump apparently thought that Senator McCain was talking about him, so President Trump replied in the classy way for which he is known:
“‘People have to be careful, because at some point I fight back. You know, I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back and it won’t be pretty.’”
Really? Does President Trump think he can threaten John McCain? Was President Trump paying attention in the 1960s and 1970s? Does President Trump remember that John McCain spent more than five years in North Vietnamese prison camps? Does President Trump know that John McCain turned down an early release offer from the North Vietnamese because his father was a high-ranking admiral in the Navy and that he refused to be released out of proper order? Does President Trump know that John McCain can’t raise his arms above his head because of being tortured by the North Vietnamese? And that Senator McCain is now fighting a very nasty form of brain cancer? Yet President Trump thinks he can threaten John McCain.
President Donald Trump is such a small, small man.
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1 Does President Trump really have nothing more important to do that to appear on radio shows?
2 Senator McCain responded to President Trump’s comments by merely saying: “It’s fine with me. I’ve faced some fairly significant adversaries in the past.” Touché.
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