John McCain’s son endorses Kamala Harris for President

The son of former Sen. John McCain endorsed Kamala Harris for President Tuesday, a sharp rebuke of his father’s party and a sign that his family’s political influence is far from waning.

Jim McCain, an intelligence officer for the US Marines, cited the Trump campaign’s bullying tactics at Arlington National Cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of service members are laid to rest, as the final straw that broke any lingering loyalty to the Republican Party. Former President Donald Trump staged an illegal photo op at the hallowed military gravesite in late August, according to the US Army.

When onsite staff tried to stop them, Trump’s team physically assaulted one of the female employees. Those involved have declined to press charges, citing a well-founded fear of violence from Trump supporters.

“It just blows me away,” McCain said in an exclusive interview with CNN. “For anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently — that it’s not about you there. It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country.”

The Party of disunity

The continued divide between the Republican Party and the family of its 2008 nominee for president highlights a widening fracture between more traditional conservatives and the far-right movement led by Trump. In a similar fashion, groups of Republicans announcing their support for Harris have become a growing presence in Arizona and across the country, while similar efforts to show Democratic support for Republican candidates have floundered.

Trump’s feud with the McCain family began in 2015, when the former reality TV personality dismissed then-Sen. John McCain’s 23 years in the US Navy on the grounds that he had been a prisoner of war. McCain’s aircraft was shot down in 1967 during a mission in the Vietnam War. He was imprisoned for six years, where he was regularly tortured for refusing to divulge sensitive information.

“The one thing I’ve known about my dad since the moment I could think, was that he was a good man and that he had done his part,” Jim McCain said of his father. “And for me to be with him towards the end of his life, hearing things [from Trump] like, he was a loser because he was captured—I don’t think I could ever overlook that.”

Electoral consequences ongoing

Tensions between Trump and McCain continued until the latter’s death in 2018. But the wound was never allowed to heal, as Trump continued to routinely disparage McCain after his death. This festered until 2022, when Republican candidate for US Senate Kari Lake—who was running for governor at the time—prematurely boasted that she and Trump killed the McCain family’s influence on Arizona politics.

“It is only those of us who have the scars who will be remembered, those of us with the scars of battle, those of us with the scars of persecution, that will make history,” Lake said. “We may have won this battle—and I won an epic battle in Arizona: We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.”

But she didn’t, and Lake and Trump’s attacks on the McCain family have been attributed as being partially responsible for Biden’s victory in Arizona in 2020 and Lake’s gubernatorial loss in 2022.

Jim is the first McCain to endorse a presidential candidate for 2024; his sister, Meghan, has stated she would not vote for either Biden or Trump, and his mother, Cindy, endorsed Biden in 2020, and served briefly in his administration as an Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies before being appointed as the executive director of the World Food Programme in 2023.