DEAR TRUMP supporters: How can you defend the current occupant in the oval office for again and again attacking late Senator John McCain, seven months after the death of this esteemed war hero and public servant who cannot anymore defend himself against Trump’s relentless tirades and character assassination?
This is beneath the dignity of the Office of the President of the United States for Trump to just easily and shamelessly attack the memory of heroes like McCain, people, institutions, world leaders and allies who are critical of him — while singing praises to and defending dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has been assaulting our elections, democratic institutions and processes, don’t you agree?
McCain was a Vietnam military veteran and prisoner of war and a long-time Republican who offered his life to service in Congress for more than 30 years. Yet even the years he was battling brain cancer, Trump had been attacking the honorable senator, saying he does not really think McCain was a hero because he was captured as a prisoner of war.
Trump, on the other hand, dodged the draft five times, saying he had “bone spurs” as an excuse to serve his country and using the wealth and influence of his wealthy father.
McCain was among the few Republicans who were never afraid of Trump for political survival nor expediency. The late senator did not mince words in calling out Trump and holding him accountable. The president’s vilification intensified when McCain became the deciding vote that made Trump’s obsession to repeal the Affordable Care Act fail.
As the attacks against McCain continued this week, we did not hear other Republicans call out Trump; instead, they spoke out about how much of a hero McCain was, but fell short for asking the president to stop.
This would be why Trump continued to spew out toxic rhetoric, hate, disrespect, and lies after lies — the Republican Party would just give him a pass, and therefore Trump’s outrageous behavior has not suffered the consequences of his deplorable actions.
Not even those who were supposed to be McCain’s best friends in the Senate like Lindsay Graham. Deplorable. Spineless. Opportunists. Fake.
I wish there would be more Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., who boldly said that Trump’s remarks over the past several days had been inappropriate.
“I want to be crystal clear: We can talk about the politics of the military any way we want to, but we don’t talk about veterans any way but to brag on them for the service they render and the job that they do,” Isakson said in a radio interview with Bill Nigut of Georgia Public Broadcasting. “It’s deplorable what he said… It will be deplorable seven months from now if he continues to say it, and I will continue to speak out.”
“There aren’t Democratic casualties and Republican casualties on the battlefield — there are American casualties,” Isakson, chairman of the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee, stated. “We should never reduce the service that people give to this country.”
As NBC News reported, Mitt Romney of Utah was the only other Republican senator to directly criticize Trump publicly over his remarks since the president launched the first of several days of fresh attacks on McCain.
“I can’t understand why the president would, once again, disparage a man as exemplary as my friend John McCain: heroic, courageous, patriotic, honorable, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, empathetic, and driven by duty to family, country and God,” Romney, who ran against McCain in the 2008 presidential primary for the Republican Party, tweeted Tuesday.
WHAT ABOUT YOU, kababayans? Would you give Trump a pass? Would you continue to enable this deplorable action?
It is time we, the people, demand that decency, respect and sanity be back in the Oval Office, and in the United States of America.
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Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFC’s “Balitang America.” Views and opinions expressed by the author in this column are solely those of the author and not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go to www.TheFil-AmPerspective.com or https://www.facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos.
