President Donald Trump sent a short statement in response to the news that Sen. John McCain had died.
“My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain,” he wrote on Twitter on Saturday night. “Our hearts and prayers are with you!”
The president reacted quickly in response to the news despite a history of criticism between the two Republicans.
Trump remained furious with McCain after the veteran senator killed a final Senate effort to repeal Obamacare in the summer of 2017 by voting no in an early morning vote.
Although not mentioning McCain by name, Trump has spent months blaming him for ruining the Republican effort to end Obamacare, despite his battle with cancer.
When it looked like McCain would support the 2017 effort, Trump praised him for returning to vote for an Obamacare repeal.
The pair famously tangled in 2015, when McCain called Trump’s 15,000 supporters who appeared for a rally in Phoenix as “crazies” and criticized his rhetoric on immigration.
“This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain said in an interview with the New Yorker. “Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.”
Trump responded by calling McCain a “dummy.”
When confronted by his rhetoric by pollster Frank Luntz at an evangelical forum in Iowa, Trump went further, dismissing the notion that the Arizona Senator was a war hero because “he was captured.”