The Arizona Republican seemed more resigned than ever to the fact that that nominee will be Trump.
“You have to listen to the people that have chosen the nominee of our Republican Party,” McCain said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think it would be foolish to ignore them.”
But McCain, who was the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, said he still had some reservations about Trump, including the insults he hurls at political opponents.
“I have never seen a personalization of a campaign like this one, where people's integrity and character are questioned,” McCain said. “It bothers me a lot. You can violently almost disagree with someone on an issue, but to attack their character and integrity — those wounds take a long time to heal.”
Asked whether he would appear at campaign events with Trump, McCain said a lot of things would have to happen first, including Trump retracting a statement he made about U.S. prisoners of war. Last July, the real-estate mogul said McCain was “not a war hero” for the five-and-a-half years he spent as a prisoner during the Vietnam War.
“I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said at the time.
In the interview aired Sunday, McCain said it was important to him that Trump “express his appreciation for veterans, not John McCain, but veterans who were incarcerated as prisoners of war.”
“What he said about me, John McCain, that’s fine,” the Senate Armed Services chairman said. “I don’t require any repair of that. But when he said, ‘I don’t like people who were captured,’ then there’s a body of American heroes that I’d like to see him retract that statement. Not about me, but about the others.”
“I’ve said all along that I would support” the nominee, McCain says.
He frames his support for Trump as a vote against Hillary Clinton, who he says “would cause the economy to continue to stumble along and put us in the economic malaise that basically we’ve had for eight years”. But he concedes “there is some distance if not a disconnect between party leadership and members of Congress and many of the voters who have selected Donald Trump.”
Some of those voters are “older, white, blue-collar workers who see no prospect of a job ever again,” he says. Others are “dissatisfied young people” and people who see “the reality that there is gridlock” in Washington.
“You have to listen to people that’ve chosen the nominee of our Republican party, I think it’d be foolish not to,” McCain says.
He grows a little reflective. “I believe that the Republican party must maintain its viability,” he says. “I am a Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan republican, and I will do everything I can to continue to steer the Republican party along those lines.” (Roosevelt was far more progressive than Reagan, breaking up major corporations and setting an environmentalist agenda.)
McCain was also asked who he thought Trump should pick as his vice presidential candidate, and McCain said Sen. Joni Ernst, a member of the Armed Service panel, “would be tremendous.”
The Iowa Republican, McCain said, “is really remarkable.”
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