Sen. John McCain on Thursday said he is concerned about Donald Trump’s “uninformed and indeed dangerous statements” on national security and urged voters to think long and hard about who they want to elect as the next commander in chief.
McCain also said he echoed concerns raised by more than 60 Republican national security experts in an open letter as well as those by 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who slammed Trump in a speech Thursday morning.
“At a time when our world has never been more complex or more in danger, as we watch the threatening actions of a neo-imperial Russia, an assertive China, an expansionist Iran, an insane North Korean ruler, and terrorist movements that are metastasizing across the Middle East and Africa, I want Republican voters to pay close attention to what our party’s most respected and knowledgeable leaders and national security experts are saying about Mr. Trump, and to think long and hard about who they want to be our next commander in chief and leader of the free world,” said McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the 2008 Republican presidential nominee.
Some experts have criticized Trump for his national security strategy, which he has vaguely summarized as a plan to “knock the hell out of the oil.” He also has taken flack for promising to bring back torture worse than waterboarding and for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump previously criticized McCain, an Arizona Republican, for being captured during the Vietnam War, during which the former Navy pilot spent more than five years in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner of war camp where he was repeatedly tortured and kept in solitary confinement, according to reports.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in July, according to Politico. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
