Ex-Biden Chief of Staff: Trump ‘Subhuman’ for Attacking John McCain

Ron Klain, former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden and Al Gore, said on MSNBC Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s criticism of the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) shows the president is “subhuman.”

A partial transcript is as follows: 

NICOLLE WALLACE: I’ve got a few theories, but take me through the relapse into McCain Derangement Syndrome from the man in the Oval Office.

PHILIP RUCKER: Well, I’ll see if I can do that, Nicole. I mean, Trump has been nursing a grudge about John McCain for more than three years now. Go all the way back to the first big controversy of Trump’s presidential campaign in August of 2015 in Iowa, where Trump made a really flippant remark about McCain saying “I like heroes who weren’t captured” and he got tremendous heat and blowback on that, including from the Republican National Committee and throughout the party establishment, and Trump, instead of apologizing to McCain and commending his war service, just dug in. Every since then, McCain has been sort of a ghost in Trump’s mind, somebody he can’t shake. He was really bothered by that healthcare vote, obviously, but it’s been other things.

…

RON KLAIN: I think there’s a personal element and a political element. On the personal side, you know, Meghan McCain says that Donald Trump is not a great man. I would say what we saw this weekend shows that Donald Trump is barely human. I mean, to go after and attack John McCain, a national hero, months after his death, is just, it’s subhuman. It’s not only not befitting a president, it’s not befitting basic common norms of decency, that’s the human aspect of it. From a political aspect, if Donald Trump really wants to relitigate the vote on Obamacare over and over again, my party won a national election in 2018 when the issue was health care, when the issue was whether or not Donald Trump was going to take away people’s coverage for pre-existing condition. Every time Donald Trump wants to sit in the Oval Office and say, “I wish I’d taken away people’s coverage for pre-existing conditions,” that’s a videotape my party would love to see on T.V. every day of the week.