The White House asked the US Navy to hide a massive ship named in part after Sen. John McCain ahead of President Donald Trump’s trip to Japan — a request exposing the great lengths staff will go to ensure Trump isn’t triggered by the memory of his former rival.
The president traveled to Yokusuka naval base to speak to US and Japanese troops on Memorial Day during his four-day trip to the Pacific nation. USS John S. McCain — named after the late lawmaker, his father, and his grandfather — is docked there for repairs after a 2017 collision that killed 10 sailors. That means there was a good chance Trump would see the destroyer — prominently featuring the McCain name — once he helicoptered in.
According to an email reviewed on Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story, a US military official ordered that “USS John McCain needs to be out of sight” when the president arrives. That directive apparently came after conversations between the White House Military Office, which provides travel and other support to the president, and the US Navy.
But the request seemingly went nowhere. Once higher-level Navy officials heard of the planning, they told their subordinates to “knock it off,” per CNN. Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan “was not aware of the directive ... nor was he aware of the concern precipitating the directive,” his spokesperson said in a statement emailed early Thursday morning to reporters. And Trump tweeted Wednesday that he “was not informed about anything having to do” with USS John McCain planning.
There is still some controversy over just how much effort was put into obscuring USS John McCain’s presence during the president’s visit. The Wall Street Journal also reported on photos showing a tarp put over the ship’s name, and after it was taken down a barge was moved closer to the destroyer to hide the name. Multiple reports also indicate that sailors aboard the McCain were given the day off during Trump’s Tuesday Memorial Day visit (it was still Monday in America).
The Navy and other US officials, however, deny or explain away all of this. “The name of USS John S. McCain was not obscured during the POTUS visit to Yokosuka on Memorial Day,” Rear Adm. Charlie Brown, the Navy’s top spokesperson, tweeted Wednesday night. “The Navy is proud of that ship, its crew, its namesake and its heritage.”
A US official told CNN that “the barge had been there regularly. At one angle, you might not have seen the ship’s name, but the name was visible at all times.” And multiple officials added that sailors from USS John McCain and USS Stethem, another destroyer at Yokusuka, were given Memorial Day weekend off. Not all sailors in the area were invited to see Trump’s speech aboard another ship, USS Wasp, because there wasn’t enough room.
Still, the request and its aftermath have reopened wounds barely healed from when McCain and Trump openly clashed over American values, the Russia investigation, healthcare, and national security. It goes to show that Trump’s staff worries how the president might react even to the idea of the former senator long after he passed away.
The McCain-Trump feud goes way back, but here are just a few examples of how it’s played out.
In July 2015, McCain told the New Yorker that a speech Trump gave in Phoenix earlier that week was “very hurtful to me ... Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.”
Trump clearly didn’t take kindly to that. He attacked McCain for spending five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam after opposing forces shot his plane down. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured,” Trump told an audience at a 2015 Christian conservative conference.
It’s worth noting that Trump never served in the Vietnam War after receiving draft deferments from 1964 to 1968 while a college student, later getting an additional deferment for medical reasons. McCain, on the other hand, suffered torture so brutal that he was permanently unable to lift his arms above his head afterward.
Then in 2017, McCain surprisingly voted against the GOP-led Senate’s so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare, keeping the law intact. Trump ceaselessly mocked McCain afterward, saying that “he’s been campaigning for eight years — repeal and replace. And he didn’t do that.”
And it didn’t help that McCain requested Trump not attend his funeral last year, even though former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — the man who defeated the senator in the 2008 presidential race — were there. Trump fumed months later: “I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve,” he said during a March rally. ”I don’t care about this, I didn’t get a thank you. That’s OK.”
To be clear, Trump didn’t authorize the funeral — that would’ve happened without his consent. However, he did he personally approve the use of Air Force 2 to fly McCain’s body from Arizona to Washington, DC (where the funeral was held). It’s not the same thing as authorizing the whole funeral, which Trump took credit for.
Trump, it seems, will hold onto this grudge forever. “I never was a fan of John McCain, and I never will be,” he told reporters in March while in the Oval Office next to Brazil’s president. No wonder, then, that his staff considered keeping USS John McCain “out of sight” — even if many would see it as extremely distasteful.
“I’ve visited the USS John S McCain and spoken with its crew - ten of whom died in a collision in 2017. They’re heroes and patriots, as were their ship’s namesakes, and should never be asked to stay out of sight,” Abraham Denmark, a former top Asia security official at the Pentagon, tweeted Wednesday. “This is a disgraceful insult.”
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May 30, 2019 at 07:20PM
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