Former aide to John McCain says he ‘had such little respect’ for Trump

A former aide to Sen. John McCain says that the late Arizona Republican was unfazed by former President Trump’s repeated insults because he didn’t respect him.

“It did not bother him a bit because he had such little respect — he had no respect for Donald Trump anyway,” Grant Woods told progressive PAC MeidasTouch in a podcast interview this week that was first reported by HuffPost.

“McCain really didn’t spend hardly any time thinking about Trump or worrying about Trump or any of that,” Woods said. “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.”

Both before and during his time in office, Trump regularly spoke derisively about McCain, going so far as to scoff at the idea that the 2008 Republican presidential nominee was a hero because of his time as a prisoner of war (POW) in Vietnam.

Trump avoided being drafted into the Vietnam War via a series of student and medical deferments, HuffPost reported.

Woods, a former GOP attorney general for Arizona who is now a registered Democrat, said on the podcast that McCain, who died of brain cancer in 2018, got upset about the remarks only after having a conservation with his POW friends. 

“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,” Woods 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,” he added. “They are heroes, and I’d never heard anyone say differently.”