The late Arizona Republican Senator John McCain “thought [Trump] was an idiot,” according to Grant Woods, who once served as a chief of staff for McCain. Woods commented on McCain’s perspective on Trump during an appearance on the MeidasTouch podcast, where he also explained how Trump’s remarks against McCain during his life hardly even fazed the late Senator, considering he “had no respect for Donald Trump anyway.” Trump criticized McCain’s military service, his service in Congress, and more, as though just about perpetually enraged at the very thought of someone within his own political party refusing to fall in line with his cult of personality.
Woods — who left the Republican Party and is now a Democrat — once served as Arizona’s state Attorney General. As Woods put it, regarding McCain:
‘McCain really didn’t spend hardly any time thinking about Trump or worrying about Trump or any of that. 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.’
Eventually, Woods suggested, McCain became more concerned about Trump’s disparaging remarks due to the impact his rhetoric had on other former prisoners of war. Referencing the claim from Trump that McCain could not reasonably be characterized as a hero because of his time spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Woods added as follows:
‘It did not bother him a bit. I mean, not a bit. He wasn’t, like, pissed for five seconds and then got over it. It did not bother him a bit, because he had such little respect, he had no respect for Donald Trump anyway… Then it started bugging him and pissing him off, and the reason was I think he might have heard from a couple of his POW buddies… 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. So then to 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.’
Watch Woods below:
