Jimmy McCain will be interviewed on “The Lead with Jake Tapper” Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET.

CNN
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When former President Donald Trump held a campaign rally at Arlington National Cemetery last week, Lt. Jimmy McCain said he saw it as a “desecration.”

The youngest son of the late Sen. John McCain was already moving away from the Republican Party — just weeks ago, he changed his voter registration to Democrat and plans to vote for Kamala Harris in November, he told CNN in an exclusive interview this week.

But he is now speaking out for the first time about Trump over the former president’s behavior on the hallowed ground where several generations of McCain’s family, including his grandfather and great-grandfather, are buried.

“It just blows me away,” McCain, who has served in the military for 17 years, told CNN. “These men and women who are lying there in the ground, they don’t have a choice” about whether they want to be a backdrop for a political campaign, he said.

“I just think that anyone who has spent a lot of time in uniform understands inherently that it’s not about you. It’s about these people who have made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their country.”

McCain’s decision to speak out now is part of his broader shift away from the Republican Party and his family’s famously conservative roots. After years as a registered independent, he said he registered as a Democrat a few weeks ago and plans to vote for Kamala Harris in November, adding that he would “get involved in any way I can” to help her campaign.

It’s a significant move for the son of a former GOP presidential candidate and Arizona senator. While other members of the McCain family have distanced themselves from Trump — including Jimmy McCain’s mother Cindy, who supported then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020, and his sister Meghan — none but Jimmy have publicly left the Republican Party.

Despite her harsh criticism of Trump, Meghan McCain indicated last week that she still would not endorse Harris. “I am a lifelong, generational conservative,” she said tweeted.

Jimmy McCain, who enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and now serves as an intelligence officer with the 158th Infantry Regiment, had until now consciously tried to avoid the political fray. Trump’s attacks on his father — that he was “not a war hero” because he was captured in Vietnam, and his reported description of the elder McCain as a “loser” — were deeply hurtful on a personal level, but not politically out of bounds, Jimmy McCain believes.

“One thing about John McCain is he has chosen a public life,” McCain said. “So to attack him is really not outside his job description.”

For the younger McCain, though, the Arlington episode and the campaign’s response to it represents a whole new level of what he sees as Trump’s lack of respect for the fallen. And he believes it stems from Trump’s own insecurities about not having served.

“A lot of these men and women who served their country chose to do something bigger than themselves,” McCain said. “They woke up one morning, they signed on the dotted line, they raised their right hand, and they chose to serve their country. And that’s an experience that Donald Trump hasn’t had. And I think that’s something he thinks about a lot.”

McCain stressed that he speaks for himself and that his views do not represent those of the U.S. military. McCain received his commission and became an officer in the U.S. Army Intelligence Community in 2022.

McCain’s anger over the Arlington affair was also particularly great because at the time it happened he had just returned from a seven-month deployment to a small American base on the Jordan-Syria border known as Tower 22.

He arrived there just weeks after three U.S. service members were killed at the base in a drone strike by Iranian-backed militants, and he says he thought of them when he saw Trump posing in front of gravestones last Monday.

“It was a violation,” McCain said. “That mother, that sister, those families, see that — and it’s a painful experience.”

Trump visited the cemetery on Monday after a wreath-laying ceremony honoring the 13 U.S. service members killed in 2021 at Abbey Gate at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan. His campaign filmed the visit, leading to an altercation with a cemetery employee who tried to prevent Trump’s team from taking photos and filming in the area where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The military says doing so violates federal law, military regulations and Defense Department policy.

Trump is not the first politician to violate a ban on political activity in Arlington. In fact, more than 20 years ago, John McCain said he made “a very big mistake” when he released a campaign ad featuring a clip of him walking through the cemetery.

Trump and his campaign, however, did not issue a mea culpa. Instead, according to the U.S. military, they ignored a cemetery employee who protested the activity and “abruptly pushed them aside” and later released footage of the event. One of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, called the military “hacks” and said it was “100% a fabricated story.”

Over the weekend, Trump’s campaign released taped statements from relatives of some of the service members killed at Abbey Gate, who said they had invited Trump to the graves of their loved ones. But the campaign’s video of the event, which it posted to TikTok, also showed other gravestones, including that of an Army Special Forces soldier who committed suicide and whose family said they had not given the campaign permission to film it.

McCain is now preparing to get more involved this election cycle. Though he has been involved in veterans work for years, he acknowledges that his own recent political shift has been deeply personal.

“John McCain was my father, and a lot of people lose that in the details,” McCain said. “He wasn’t ‘John McCain’ as he is to the world. He was the man who loved me. And the only thing I knew about my father since I could think was that he was a good man and he did his part. And being with him at the end of his life, and hearing things (from Trump) like, he was a loser because he was captured — I don’t think I could ever unsee that.”