President Trump and John McCain Are Feuding, Again. Here's a Brief History

Sen. John McCain took what appears to be a swipe at President Trump while discussing the Vietnam War draft during an interview that aired Sunday on C-SPAN.

“One aspect of the [Vietnam] conflict by the way that I will never ever countenance is that we drafted the lowest income level of America and the highest income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur,” said the Arizona Republican, who is battling cancer. “That is wrong. That is wrong. If we are going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve.”

McCain, a veteran of that war who was captured by the North Vietnamese, did not mention Trump by name in his comments, but the bone spurs comment was something of a tell.

Trump received five deferments during the War. Four while he was attending college and one after a doctor diagnosed him with bone spurs in his heels after he graduated. “I had a doctor that gave me a letter — a very strong letter on the heels,” he told the New York Times in 2o16.

Trump and McCain have a history of feuding.

In the throes of the 2016 campaign, Trump said McCain is “a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” After the release of an “Access Hollywood” tape that including audio of Trump seemingly bragging about assaulting women, McCain withdrew his support. Trump responded by calling McCain “very foul mouthed” in a tweet.

The feud has only continued. Last week, McCain delivered a blistering rebuke of the president’s approach to politics. While receiving a Liberty Medal from theNational Constitution Center, he decried “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century,” he said, is as “unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

After the speech, the president warned that he will “fight back” when asked about it in an interview. “I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back, and it won’t be pretty,” he said.

Before that, Trump attacked McCain over his decisive vote against a Republican bill that would have repealed the Affordable Care Act. In a tweet, the president said he’d “Let Arizona down!” when he voted against the bill.

McCain was asked if he voted against the bill in an effort to get back at Trump for questioning his Vietnam War record in an interview with “60 Minutes.”

McCain said the vote wasn’t personal, but said he and the president had notable differences,” Different upbringing. Different life experiences,” he said.

“He is in the business of making money and he has been successful both in television as well as Miss America and others,” he said. “I was raised in a military family.”

He continued: “I was raised in the concept and belief that duty, honor, country is the lodestar for the behavior that we have to exhibit every single day.”