Arizona senator John McCain strongly condemned any attempt to draw a moral equivalence between the United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia Tuesday, after President Donald Trump appeared to suggest such an equivalence over the weekend.
In remarks on the Senate floor honoring Vladimir Kara-Murza, a leading Russian opposition activist who is currently in a coma, McCain—without mentioning Trump by name—rebuked the notion of a moral parallel between America and Russia.
“Vladimir [Kara-Murza] knew that Putin is a killer,” McCain said. “Vladimir knew that there was no moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia.”
“I repeat,” he continued, banging his hand on the lectern. “There is no moral equivalence between that butcher and thug and KGB colonel and the United States of America, the country that Ronald Reagan used to call a shining city on a hill.”
“To allege some kind of moral equivalence between the two is either terribly misinformed or incredibly biased,” he said. “Neither can be accurate in any way.”
Trump reiterated his respect for Russian president Vladimir Putin in an interview that aired Sunday and brushed off the charge that Putin is a “killer.” “We’ve got a lot of killers,” Trump said. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
Republican lawmakers rejected those remarks in the hours that followed.
“When has a Democratic political [activist] ever been poisoned by the GOP or vice versa? We are not the same as #Putin,” Florida senator Marco Rubio wrote in a tweet.
Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday denied that Trump was drawing a moral parallel between the United States and Russia.
“There was no moral equivalency. What you heard there was a determination to attempt to deal with the world as it is. To start afresh with Putin and to start afresh with Russia,” Pence said.
McCain has also been a leading advocate of lethal defensive aid to Ukraine, and called on the administration to provide such assistance to Ukrainians fighting Russian-backed separatists in a letter last week.
“Vladimir Putin’s violent campaign to destabilize and dismember the sovereign nation of Ukraine will not stop unless and until he meets a strong and determined response,” he wrote.
The Arizona senator told THE WEEKLY STANDARD on Tuesday that he has not yet received a response from the Trump administration on the matter.
