The 24-hour news cycle is going into overdrive this morning as Donald Trump‘s comments Saturday about Sen. John McCain continue to reverberate. “He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said during a day-long candidate event in Iowa. “I like people who weren’t captured,” he added.
The comments were news all weekend long, with other candidates, from both the GOP field as well as democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, repudiating his comments. But until this morning we hadn’t heard from Sen. McCain. The 2008 GOP presidential nominee appeared on Morning Joe at 7:30 a.m., and, in a rare move, was simulcast on NBC’s Today show.
McCain doesn’t feel he’s due an apology, but added, “I think he may owe an apology to the families of those who have sacrificed in conflict and those who have undergone the prison experience in serving their country.” He also demurred when the label “hero” was brought up. “A great honor of my life was to serve in the company of heroes. I’m not a hero,” he said to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
The McCain interview came 20 minutes after Matt Lauer got his own contentious interview, by phone, with the Donald. It devolved into a what-did-you-say? and how-did-you-report-what-I-said? debate.
“We did run the other part of the comments, Mr. Trump, the part where you said he is a war hero. Please don’t say we didn’t because we did,” Lauer snapped at Trump.
Trump gave his first TV interview on the matter to Martha Raddatz Sunday on ABC’s This Week. But something tells me this story has a few more hours left in it before the media moves on to another story about candidate Trump.
As for Huffington Post’s promise that it is covering Trump as entertainment, not as a political candidate, they are keeping to their word. Two stories published Saturday about the event, appear in the entertainment section not on the politics page (but there are several Trump blog posts in the politics section).