It’ll be a cold day in hell before Donald Trump ever apologizes to Sen. John McCain.
In a new interview, the presidential frontrunner refused to say he regrets anything he said about McCain being a war hero (or, ahem, insinuating that he isn’t one).
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt gave Trump multiple chances to walk back his comments about McCain. Instead, the candidate said that McCain has not helped veterans.
Hewitt: “You’ve said you don’t like people who get taken captive. Do you regret that? I mean can we admit that was a mistake?”
In true Trumpian fashion, he wouldn’t acknowledge any error. Instead, he gave a shout-out to Sheryl Attkisson for getting the story right.
Trump replied, “Hugh, I actually said and when they took the whole statement… it worked fine. But where I’m upset with John McCain and have been for a long time, I’ve been making the rounds to many states and you see that I’m all over the place and the veterans come up to see me about — some of these guys are just strong powerful, wonderful people and the families are wonderful and they come up to me and they have tears coming down their eyes because of the way they are treated. And John McCain has nothing, nothing for the veterans.”
Trump had political advice for McCain. (Last month the senator declared that Trump was “firing up the crazies” with his comments on immigration.)
“With phenomenal people and John McCain called them crazies and that — and these people were phenomenal Americans and he called them crazies. …He’s got to be a little bit careful,” he said. “You can’t call those people crazies and you got to have the Veterans and he — it just hasn’t worked for the Veterans.”
Hewitt circled back to whether getting captured in combat is courageous.
Trump, who previously said he likes people who weren’t captured, remarked: “Oh, absolutely. I said that. I’ve actually said it. You know you had a very, a very good reporter as you know — you’ve heard all about that analyze what I’ve said and came out and Attkisson had said what I said was right but they had to read it and they take a quarter or a half sentence out, but certainly it’s courage. I have no question about that.”
He closed this part of the conversation by insulting McCain’s treatment of veterans. “[McCain] has not taken care of the veterans and the veterans are treated very badly in our country and that’s terrible,” he said.