Jimmy McCain, the youngest son of late Republican Sen. John McCain, told CNN on Tuesday week that he plans to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
Jimmy McCain, a first lieutenant who serves as a Marine Corps intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment, also said he has changed his voter registration to Democrat.
The interview with McCain comes amid an ongoing war of words between the Harris and Donald Trump campaigns over military matters.
Trump was criticized last week after his campaign staff got into an altercation with an Arlington National Cemetery staff member who was trying to prevent them from taking video footage at a grave site, which the cemetery confirmed would be a violation of federal law.
Trump’s campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung insulted the unidentified staff member, telling Newsweek they were “suffering from a mental health episode,” while another campaign official, Chris LaCivita, called the staff member a “despicable individual” who “does not deserve to represent the [hallowed] grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”
Cindy McCain, escorted by her son’s Jack and Jimmy McCain arrives at the Arizona State Capitol, with Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, for the service for her husband Senator John McCain, where he will lie in state on August 29, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona.
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Military officials said the staffer, a woman, declined to press charges because she feared retaliation from Trump’s supporters.
Trump’s campaign’s later released a campaign video on TikTok using the footage from the memorial.
McCain’s grandfather and great grandfather are both buried at Arlington.
“It just blows me away,” McCain, 34, told CNN. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” of whether to be a backdrop for a political campaign, he said.
“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.”
Jimmy McCain, son of late U.S. Senator John McCain, touches his father’s casket during ceremonies honoring the late US Senator John McCain inside the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, August 31, 2018 in Washington, DC.
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Jimmy McCain is the first member of the McCain family to officially abandon the Republican party, which ran his father as its nominee just 16 years ago. However, his mother, Cindy McCain, and his sister, Meghan McCain, have consistently decried Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
Jimmy McCain told CNN he “would get involved in any way I could” to help the Harris campaign.
Progressive veterans’ group VoteVets is applying even more heat to the Trump campaign amid the Arlington backlash.
The group has released a new attack-ad on Donald Trump, listing the presidential candidate’s long history of alleged and confirmed insults to veterans. Among them is the broadside that Trump originally leveled against the elder McCain in 2015, saying he “liked people who weren’t captured,” referring to McCain’s years spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
“We’ve got Trump on the run. Scared, his insults about service members catching up with him, he’s panicked,” the ad opens.
The ad was posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday and had been viewed 617,000 times by Monday morning.
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