Message #178040

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post…

Trump ‘made a mistake’ by not honoring
John McCain's service, Jimmy Carter says

Trump's belated proclamation on McCain, while a good step, was
“still not as enthusiastic as it should be,” the former president said.

By FELICIA SONMEZ and JOHN WAGNER | 1:26PM EDT — Tuesday, August 28, 2018


Former president Jimmy Carter speaks during the opening ceremony event for the Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project on Sunday,
inside the University of Notre Dame's Purcell Pavilion in South Bend, Indiana. — Photograph: Robert Franklin/Associated Press.

FORMER PRESIDENT Jimmy Carter said on Tuesday that President Trump initially erred by not acknowledging the late Senator John McCain's (Republican-Arizona) service to the country, but that his reversal in a later statement undid some of the damage.

Carter, who turns 94 in October, weighed in on Trump's response to McCain's death in a pair of TV appearances in which he also promoted his post-presidency work with Habitat for Humanity.

“I thought that President Trump made a mistake at first” by issuing a tweet that made no mention of McCain's service, Carter told Fox Business Network's Neil Cavuto.

Trump's critics and supporters later made the president's mis-step clear to him, Carter said, adding: “I think his last statement that I read yesterday has basically corrected that.”

In an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, Carter elaborated further, saying that the proclamation Trump issued on Monday was “still not as enthusiastic as it should be.”

After McCain's death on Saturday at the age of 81, Trump rejected the advice of top aides who advocated releasing an official statement that gave the decorated Vietnam War POW plaudits for his military and Senate service and called him a “hero.” Trump instead offered words of condolence to the senator's family in a tweet that made no mention of McCain's storied service in the military and on Capitol Hill.

As criticism mounted, Trump later changed course and said in a statement on Monday: “Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain's service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment.”

In the proclamation, Trump also ordered that flags be lowered to half-staff until McCain's burial, a reversal that came hours after flags were raised to full-staff early on Monday.

Carter told Cavuto that he prays for Trump and hopes the president will promote human rights and keep the United States out of war. He also reprised some of his criticism of Trump as having a loose relationship with the truth, telling Cavuto that Trump “has made statements that were not exactly correct.”

“I think that John McCain and I, who were both graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, were imbued with a principle that the truth was pre-eminent and was a real test of integrity,” Carter said. “Any kind of misleading statement that you made at the Naval Academy would result in instant dismissal.”

But he also struck a hopeful note.

In his interview with MSNBC's Mitchell, Carter noted the Naval Academy's strict requirements and said, “I think we'll get back to that standard in the future.”

While the United States is “looked upon with a great deal of doubt” across the world, Carter added, “over a period of time, the resilience and the basic ideas of our country will prevail.”

__________________________________________________________________________

• Felicia Sonmez is a national political reporter at The Washington Post covering breaking news from the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. Previously, she spent more than four years in Beijing, where she worked first as a correspondent for Agence France-Presse and later as the editor of The Wall Street Journal's China Real Time Report. She also spent a year in advanced Chinese language study as a Blakemore Freeman Fellow at Tsinghua University. From 2010 to 2013, she reported on national politics for The Washington Post, starting as a writer for The Fix and going on to cover Congress, the 2012 presidential campaign and the early days of President Barack Obama's second term. She began her career teaching English in Beijing and has also covered U.S. politics for the Asahi Shimbun and National Journal's the Hotline.

• John Wagner is a national reporter who leads The Washington Post's new breaking political news team. He previously covered the Trump White House. During the 2016 presidential election, Wagner focused on the Democratic campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley. He earlier chronicled Maryland government for more than a decade, a stretch that included O’Malley's eight years as governor and part of the tenure of his Republican predecessor, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. He came to The Post from The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he served as the paper's Washington correspondent, covering the 2004 presidential bid of Senator John Edwards and the final years in office of Senator Jesse Helms.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-made-a-mistake-by-not-honoring-john-mccains-service-jimmy-carter-says/2018/08/28/736dc8a4-aadb-11e8-8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html