United States President Donald Trump has issued a warning to Senator John McCain a day after his fellow Republican delivered a thinly veiled attack in a speech.
“People have to be careful because at some point I fight back,” Trump told a Washington radio station yesterday. On Monday, the senator deplored “half-baked, spurious nationalism” in a perceived slight at Trump’s so-called America First policy.
A former prisoner of war, McCain was diagnosed with brain cancer in July. “I’m being very, very nice but at some point I fight back and it won’t be pretty,” Trump told WMAL yesterday in response to a question about the senator’s remarks.
McCain was asked by journalists about Trump’s remark, and he responded: “I have faced tougher adversaries.” Receiving the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia a day earlier, the six-term senator from Arizona warned against the US surrendering its international leadership.
McCain was applauded as he said: “To fear the world we have organised 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.
“We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil,” he continued.
“We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did.”
The Liberty Medal is an award recognising leadership in pursuit of freedom whose previous recipients have included Hillary Clinton, Steven Spielberg, Muhammad Ali and Tony Blair.
McCain was presented with the medal by former US Vice-President Joe Biden, whose eldest son died from the same type of cancer McCain now has. Biden praised the “courage and loyalty” of his former colleague and ex-Navy pilot.McCain recently torpedoed Trump-backed Republican attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare, the 2010 healthcare law.
According to political website Axios, the US president mocked McCain’s thumbs-down gesture as he rejected one of the bills.McCain has limited mobility of his arms as a result of his injuries from being shot down and tortured in a North Vietnamese prison. During his presidential campaign, Trump was criticised when he said McCain was not a war hero, adding: “I like people who weren’t captured.”