McCain: I’ve Yet to Meet President Trump Since He Took Office

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Sen. John McCain has not met Donald Trump in years, McCain said Friday, a measure of the degree to which the president has frozen out his most biting Republican critics.

McCain, R-Ariz., who has sharply attacked Trump’s message on a host of international issues, most notably his approach to Russia, is a former Republican standard-bearer who remains chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. His exclusion from access to the Oval Office may suggest that Trump is focusing on wooing allies already sympathetic to him while spurning dissenters, even if they could potentially provide political cover and support.

“I have not talked to the president,” McCain said at the Brussels Forum, a conference organized by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “I met him some years ago. I have not met him since.”

McCain said he speaks almost daily to Trump’s national security team, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster. But the Republican senator added that he was “not positive who the president listens to,” and he expressed worry that Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief political strategist, was more influential than the president’s more conventional foreign policy hands.

McCain’s acknowledgment that he has not met with Trump comes at a delicate political moment for the president. Trump has been struggling – and, so far, failing – to assemble a workable Republican House coalition to pass an overhaul of the Affordable Care Act. Though McCain’s criticisms focused more on international affairs than on domestic policy, the splits over health care have made clear that Trump still needs to woo all sides of his fractious party if he is to pass his ambitious political agenda.

McCain, asked what advice he had for Trump, told him to “stop tweeting” and to reach across the aisle.

And in trying to explain the increasing reluctance of the Republican base to get involved in world affairs, he reached toward prominent 1930s-era figures who were notable for their sympathetic approach to the Nazis. McCain pointed to Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh as examples of a persistent strain of isolationism in U.S. politics.

McCain repeated a call for a “select committee” to investigate alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, saying that “right now there is great skepticism, actually, as to whether Congress can conduct an investigation in a thorough and efficient fashion.”

“This is a most serious issue,” McCain said. “The question is how significant were those ties.”

His call for an independent investigation came after Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said this week that he had briefed Trump on the committee’s investigation into the Russia ties, prompting critics to say he was acting more like an advocate for the president than an independent investigator.

(c) 2017, The Washington Post · Michael Birnbaum 

{Matzav.com}


15 COMMENTS

  1. Interesting. I’ve also yet to meet President Trump since he took office. Any suggestions, John, on how we should fix that?

  2. Nebach. McCain still thinks he won the election in 2008. Nobody Owes him anything. Who does this taxpayer paid salary think he is?

  3. Anonymous – I’m not sure he’s a snake. I think he just got rattled in the brain a little bit too much in hanoi, so he doesn’t really know if he’s coming or going. He tries to make peace with enemies and fight with friends – something like obama style international politics. Too bad he (obama) couldn’t do it domestically.

  4. Go into any embassy & ask them who they respect more?Answer:McCain

    Eh it was Trump who made fun of McCain early in his campaign, rather than the other way around

  5. John, you’ve had nothing nice to say about him EVER: why do you think he wants to see you? In fact, you’ve only worked to stymie his efforts as president: why should he care to meet you?

  6. So thats the reason for all the negative behavior and attention seeking? like a little kid in a classroom that wants the teachers attention so behaves badly.

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