Institute punches back

McCain Institute punches back at Trump broadsides

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO

With the late Sen. John McCain unable to defend himself against President Donald Trump’s escalating attacks, the McCain Institute is hitting back on his behalf.

The leadership institute on Wednesday released a fact sheet about the former GOP presidential nominee that reads as a point-by-point rebuttal of the president’s criticisms in recent days.

While the fact sheet makes no mention of Trump, it opens with a section detailing McCain’s military service. It argues that though McCain graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy (Trump taunted McCain over the weekend for being “last in class”), he “was known as a fierce fighter, a loyal friend and a leader among his peers.”

During the 2016 campaign, Trump infamously declined to refer to McCain as a war hero, saying that “I like people who weren’t captured.” The McCain Institute fact sheet puts McCain’s capture in fuller detail, noting that he was captured when his plane was shot down during the war.

McCain “was held for 5 years in a Vietnamese prison and brutally tortured. He refused early release because his father was an Admiral, insisting on upholding the code of honor that those taken first must be released first,” it says.

The document closes with a section on McCain’s history with the Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. Trump has repeatedly attacked McCain for being the decisive vote in 2017 that sunk the GOP’s efforts to gut the law.

The fact sheet notes, as Trump has, that McCain opposed the ACA, known as Obamacare, and fully supported Trump’s stated goal to repeal and replace the law.

“John McCain voted against the bill presented to the U.S. Senate – his famous ‘thumbs down’ – because it was ‘repeal,’ without ‘replace,’” the fact sheet reads, noting that the former senator “urged that the legislation go through the ‘regular order’ in the Senate, to make sure it was well thought out and supported, rather than through a lateral move outside the regular order.”

The fact sheet calls McCain the “original ‘drain the swamp’ Senator,” invoking one of Trump’s campaign slogans and promises that he would bring ethical reforms to Washington.

It also details McCain’s record of service on veterans’ issues and his stance on the Iraq War, both of which the president ripped in a speech in Ohio earlier in the day. The fact sheet notes that the legislation Trump frequently touts as one of his signature accomplishments on veterans' issues aimed at reforming health care offerings for veterans was authored by McCain.

In apparent response to the president on Wednesday blaming McCain in part for U.S. military involvement in the Middle East beginning in the early 2000s, which Trump on Wednesday called “a disaster for the country,” the fact sheet says that McCain “quickly became a critic” of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War, after initially supporting it — not unlike Trump at the time.

The fact sheet additionally notes that McCain opposed the early withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, which many have credited for allowing Islamic State militants to flourish, and urged for early intervention in Syria, “which would have prevented the spread of ISIS.”

It makes no mention of Trump’s other favorite criticism of McCain, that he passed along the Steele dossier, a mostly unverified document focusing on the president’s alleged ties to Russia, to the FBI.