John McCain Had A Scathing Reason For Not Caring About Trump’s Insults, Says Former Aide

Grant Woods, a former chief of staff to the late Sen. John McCain, has recalled why the Arizona Republican couldn’t have cared less about the insults leveled at him by ex-President Donald Trump.

“It did not bother him a bit because he had such little respect, he had no respect for Donald Trump anyway,” Woods, a former GOP Arizona attorney general who became a Democrat in 2018, told progressive PAC MeidasTouch’s podcast this week.

Trump repeatedly attacked McCain during his 2016 campaign and presidency.

The then-reality TV personality mocked the decorated Navy veteran for being captured and held as a prisoner for five years during the Vietnam War, even though Trump avoided the draft with a series of student and medical deferments.

“McCain really didn’t spend hardly any time thinking about Trump or worrying about Trump or any of that,” said Woods. “He called it as he saw it and he thought Trump was an asshole and he thought he was an idiot. And if he spent any time on it, it was in trying not to say that publicly as much as he thought it.”

Woods said McCain, who died in August 2018 following a brain cancer diagnosis, was not fazed by Trump’s comments.

“It did not bother him a bit. I mean, not a bit,” he said. “He wasn’t like pissed for five seconds and then got over.”

McCain only later became bugged by Trump’s attacks on his war record after talking with his POW friends, said McCain.

“It’s one thing for John McCain, where he was, to go, ‘Yeah, who cares.’” But for these guys, their identity, their life was wrapped up in being a POW,” he said. “So to then have someone nationally say, ‘Hey you’re not a hero, that’s all bogus.’ That wasn’t right to put an 80-year-old guy through that at that point in time, because they are heroes and I’d never heard anyone say differently.”