Cindy McCain, wife of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, will endorse Joe Biden over President Trump in the 2020 election, according to the Democratic presidential nominee.
McCain narrated a video about her husband’s bipartisan friendship with Biden and the strong ties between their two families during the Democratic convention but declined to support him directly and publicly.
Biden told donors Tuesday she had changed her mind after Trump reportedly called dead soldiers “losers” and fallen Marines “suckers” in 2018, claims the two-term vice president has folded into his stump speech on the campaign trail.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I’m about to go on one of these Zooms with John McCain’s wife, who is first-time ever is endorsing me because of what he talks about with my son and John’s, who are heroes, who served their country, you know, he said, ‘They’re losers, they’re suckers,'” Biden said during the digital fundraiser.
Cindy McCain promoted the video before it aired during the convention, despite insisting a year earlier she wouldn’t get involved in presidential politics.
“My husband and Vice President Biden enjoyed a 30+ year friendship dating back to before their years serving together in the Senate, so I was honored to accept the invitation from the Biden campaign to participate in a video celebrating their relationship,” McCain tweeted last month.
Beau Biden, Delaware’s former attorney general, died in 2015 at the age of 46 from brain cancer. He joined the military in 2003, rising to the rank of major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps as part of Delaware’s 261st Signal Brigade.
John McCain died in 2018 at the age of 81 from glioblastoma, the same aggressive form of brain cancer. McCain, a naval aviator, was held as a Vietnam prisoner of war for five years after his plane was shot down in 1967, declining an opportunity for early release offered because of his father. The McCains have clashed with Trump numerous times following the president saying the senator wasn’t a war hero because he was captured.
Biden met McCain in the 1970s after he was elected to represent Delaware in the U.S. Senate and McCain was acting as a congressional military attache. The two friends later became political opponents when Barack Obama picked Biden as his running mate and McCain was nominated as the 2008 Republican standard-bearer.
The Atlantic reported this month that Trump didn’t want to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris two years ago because it was “filled with losers.” The outlet also wrote that the president referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who were killed during the1918 Battle of Belleau as “suckers.”
