President Donald Trump insisted Thursday he properly honoured John McCain following his death but wouldn\u2019t say whether he thought the Arizona Republican would have made a better president than Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
Trump ordered White House flags raised to full staff the day after McCain\u2019s death, angering many Americans and prompting a letter from the nation\u2019s largest veterans group asking him to keep the flags at half staff until the senator\u2019s burial, an honour that has been bestowed on some other senators who died in office.<\/p>\n
Asked if he missed an opportunity to unite the country and made a mistake, Trump disagreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I don\u2019t think I did at all,\u201d he said in an interview with Bloomberg News in the Oval Office. \u201cI\u2019ve done everything that they requested and no, I don\u2019t think I have at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump and McCain clashed on a range of policy issues. And even after McCain disclosed he had brain cancer, the president continued to grouse in public about what turned out to be one of the Arizona senator\u2019s last votes, blocking a measure to repeal Obamacare.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had our disagreements and they were very strong disagreements,\u201d Trump said Thursday. \u201cI disagreed with many of the things that I assume he believed in.\u201d<\/p>\n
McCain lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama, an outcome the senator called a \u201cprivilege\u201d in a letter to the country released after his death.<\/p>\n
Asked if McCain would have been a better president, Trump declined to say, even as his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, stared at him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to comment on it,\u201d he said. \u201cI have a very strong opinion, all right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanders, he joked, was \u201chaving a nervous breakdown\u201d over his response. \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll give you that answer some day later.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanders, aides said, had more than one conversation with Trump this week about paying respects to McCain.?<\/p>\n
Trump faced a bipartisan outcry for his response to McCain\u2019s death. Trump\u2019s only immediate public comment on the six-term Republican senator and former GOP presidential nominee was a brief tweet hours after the death sending condolences to his family.<\/p>\n
Flags at the White House were lowered on Saturday night after McCain\u2019s death and raised again Sunday, the bare minimum required by law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Donald Trump insisted Thursday he properly honoured John McCain following his death but wouldn\u2019t say whether he thought the Arizona Republican would have made a better president than Barack Obama. Trump ordered White House flags raised to full staff the day after McCain\u2019s death, angering many Americans and prompting a letter from the nation\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40783,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40782"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40784,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40782\/revisions\/40784"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}