JD Vance: John McCain probably wouldn't back Harris because of border

Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) told a crowd in Phoenix this week that he doesn’t believe the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) would support Vice President Harris becoming president if McCain saw the conditions at the southern border.

The remark came just two days after McCain’s son, Army 1st Lt. Jimmy McCain, revealed he will vote for Harris this fall, joining several top aides to McCain who have also have come out in support of the Democratic ticket.

“I do not believe for a second that if John McCain were alive today, and he sees what’s going on at the American southern border, that he would support Kamala Harris and all the destruction she’s wrought,” Vance said Thursday.

Former President Trump and Vance have made the border a key issue in the presidential race against Harris, after the border wall was the GOP presidential nominee’s signature issue during his 2016 run for the White House.

Trump had a tempestuous relationship with McCain, who died of brain cancer in 2018.

Trump frequently lashed out at McCain, a decorated Navy veteran who narrowly escaped death while being held prisoner for five years during the Vietnam War, and once dismissed his military service, saying he preferred “people who weren’t captured.”

In announcing his support for Harris, Jimmy McCain, a military intelligence officer, condemned Trump for a widely-reported incident at Arlington National Cemetery last month involving Trump’s campaign and photos taken in a solemn area of the cemetery despite federal law restricting photography there and prohibiting politicizing the grounds. The Trump campaign has defended the conduct because the former president was a guest of Gold Star family members.

Jimmy McCain said he considered it “a violation.”

“These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” about being in a political ad, he said during an interview on CNN. “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,” he added.

Vance, a Marine veteran, said he is unbothered by Jimmy McCain’s comments on the Trump-Harris match-up.

“John McCain died, what, five, six, seven years ago? And the media is turning it into a story, ‘What John McCain’s family says about Donald Trump,'” he said. “Whatever John McCain’s family thinks, whatever John McCain would have ultimately thought about Kamala Harris’s policies, my goal here is to persuade every single person in this room and every single person in the state of Arizona that their lives will be better if they elect Donald J. Trump.”

Arizona could prove pivotal to this year’s election, as it did four years ago. According to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s polling average, Harris and Trump are neck and neck at 48 percent in the state.

John McCain and President Biden were longtime friends and served together in Congress for decades. Biden, teary-eyed, spoke at McCain’s funeral six years ago. Trump, who was president at the time, was not invited and later complained that he never received a “thank you” from McCain’s family for his approval of state funeral honors.

Biden’s close ties with the McCain family extended through the 2020 election, when he narrowly defeated Trump in Arizona, after Cindy McCain, the former senator’s widow, endorsed the Democrat. Cindy McCain, 70, is now executive director of the World Food Programme, after Biden appointed her to an ambassador role in 2021.

John and Cindy McCain’s daughter, media personality Meghan McCain, has said she will not vote for Trump or Harris this fall.

Source link