Donald Trump Called John McCain’s Vietnam War Captivity ‘Irrelevant,’ Seemed Not To Know What Happened: Report

After his verbal attack on John McCain in July of 2015, in which he called McCain “not a war hero” and appeared to ridicule McCain’s five-and-half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp during the Vietnam war by saying, “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” as Politico reported, Trump was asked by a reporter if he was “familiar” with what happened to McCain during that period.

But according to Stephen Hayes, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, when asked if he knew what McCain had endured during his harrowing captivity in the infamous prison camp known as “The Hanoi Hilton,” where McCain was repeatedly tortured, Trump appeared to neither know nor care, calling McCain’s prisoner-of-war ordeal “irrelevant,” according to a post by Hayes late Saturday on his Twitter feed.

“Immediately after those comments, I asked Trump at a press conference if he wanted to apologize to McCain, Trump said: ‘No, not at all.'” Hayes wrote.

“When I asked him he was familiar with what happened to McCain during his captivity, Trump said: ‘It’s irrelevant.'”

McCain, then 31-years-old, was a Navy pilot in the Vietnam war. His plane was shot down over what was then North Vietnam on October 26, 1967, according to ABC News. He was held in the Hanoi prison camp and subjected to frequent torture until his release on March 14, 1973, after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords which ended the United States’ involvement in the war.

According to an account by another Washington reporter, David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, not only did Trump refuse to apologize to McCain for his remarks deriding McCain’s experiences in the war and denying the Arizona senator’s heroism, Trump claimed that he made the remarks because he knew that attacking McCain would excite Republican primary voters, Corn wrote on his Twitter feed.

“A Trump aide told me that Trump was delighted his anti-McCain remark enraged pundits and calculated the comment (and the politerati’s outrage) would play well with the GOP primary voters he was chasing,” Corn wrote.

Following McCain’s death at age 81 on Saturday after a lengthy battle with brain cancer, Trump posted a note of “sympathy” on his own Twitter account, but the note included no words praising McCain, giving his “respect” only to “the family of John McCain.

As the Inquisitr reported, Trump posted the same note of “sympathy” on his official Instagram account, accompanying the message with a photograph not of McCain — but of himself.