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Trump Says He Didn’t Know About Efforts to Hide the U.S.S. McCain Let’s Not Upset the President: The White House Tells the Navy to Hide the U.S.S. McCain
(about 5 hours later)
WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Thursday he knew nothing about White House efforts to hide a Navy destroyer named in part after the late Senator John McCain during a visit to Japan this week. But, he said, whoever made the request was “well meaning” given that Mr. Trump did not like Mr. McCain, escalating the president’s continued fight with a dead war hero. WASHINGTON — The White House’s directive to hide a Navy destroyer named after Senator John McCain during President Trump’s recent visit to a naval base in Japan was driven, administration officials said on Thursday, by a fear of bad visuals — the name of the president’s nemesis clearly visible in photographs of him.
The request to hide the war ship was an effort to keep Mr. McCain’s name out of photographs while Mr. Trump was in Yokosuka, a White House official said; military officials described a broader motive to keep the late senator’s name out of sight. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal decisions. In truth, it would have been a bad visual for only one person: Mr. Trump.
The destroyer is named after the late senator, as well as his grandfather, John S. McCain Sr., a Navy admiral during World War II, and his father, John S. McCain Jr., an admiral in the Vietnam War era. Yet an effort to airbrush an American warship by covering its name with a giant tarp and then hiding it with a barge demonstrates how anxious the Trump administration has become about the grudges of the president. It also shows the extraordinary lengths officials in the bureaucracy are willing to go to avoid provoking Mr. Trump.
“Now, somebody did it because they thought I didn’t like him, O.K.?” Mr. Trump said Thursday. “They were well-meaning, I will say. I didn’t know anything about it. I would never have done that.” Sailors from the McCain were not invited to Mr. Trump’s speech on another ship, the Wasp, at the Yokosuka Naval Base, although crew members from most other American ships at the base were, a Navy service member based at Yokosuka said.
“So, I wasn’t a fan of John McCain, I never will be,” Mr. Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “But certainly I couldn’t care less whether or not there’s a boat named after his father.” When several sailors from the McCain — wearing uniforms that bore the ship’s name and insignia — turned up anyway at the Wasp to hear Mr. Trump’s speech, they were turned away, the service member said. The service member, who requested anonymity because he was not allowed to speak publicly, said that a gate guard told the two sailors they were not allowed on the Wasp because they were from the McCain.
The war ship is docked in Japan and undergoing repairs from a 2017 accident that left 10 American sailors dead. The hide-the-ship scheme, which Mr. Trump insisted he knew nothing about but called a “well meaning” gesture, drew a torrent of criticism on Thursday from retired military officers. They said it was an egregious attempt to politicize the armed forces, while Democratic lawmakers termed it petty vindictiveness against a dead war hero.
[Here are some F.A.Q.s about the U.S.S. John S. McCain.] The episode came at the end of a visit in which Mr. Trump had already sided with a foreign dictator against his national security adviser over the threat posed by North Korean missiles, and joined that dictator, Kim Jong-un, in heaping ridicule on a former vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Critics were quick to call out Mr. Trump for what they said was a petty war of words against Mr. McCain, who died last year of brain cancer. “It makes my grief unbearable,” Meghan McCain, the daughter of the late senator, said on Twitter. The email instructing the Navy to obscure the ship, the John S. McCain, came from the White House military operations office, after consultation with a White House advance team working in Japan, according to an administration official. The Navy initially complied with the order by hanging a tarp over the ship’s name. But higher-level officers got wind of the plan and ordered the tarp removed and the barge moved before Mr. Trump arrived.
Democratic lawmakers who previously served in the military also took umbrage at what they said appeared to be Mr. Trump’s attempts to divide a typically apoliticalgovernment institution. “It sounds like someone in the chain of command made a boneheaded mistake in judgment,” said Jack Keane, a retired Army general who advises Mr. Trump and said he once tried to broker a reconciliation between him and Mr. McCain.
“We have a long history of keeping our military apolitical,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee who is a former top Pentagon official. “The president’s team felt it was appropriate to politicize this event.” It is not clear, in any event, if Mr. Trump even saw the McCain during his brief visit. He arrived in Yokosuka on Marine One, and addressed the sailors in a hangar bay below decks on the Wasp.
The Navy has said it did not hide the ship, but sailors aboard the McCain were given the day off on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump visited the Yokosuka Naval Base. The acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, has denied knowing about the White House directive. But questions about why the Navy has acquiesced to it are likely to dog Mr. Shanahan when he goes before the Senate for his confirmation hearing in the coming weeks.
Sailors assigned to the McCain also were not invited to attend the president’s speech on the assault ship Wasp, while all of the other American war ships at the harbor were invited to send 60 to 70 sailors. When some McCain sailors arrived at Mr. Trump’s speech in their uniforms, they were turned away. Mr. Trump is not the first president to politicize the military: George W. Bush famously landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and spoke to sailors under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” during the Iraq war. Nor is he the first president to nurse grudges: Richard M. Nixon once ordered a reference to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” deleted from a speech because it was a favorite hymn of John F. Kennedy.
Current and former Navy officers who served in Asia expressed alarm at the reports. But Mr. Trump has taken both habits to greater extremes. Some of the nearly 1,000 sailors and Marines at his speech in Japan wore round patches emblazoned with a likeness of Mr. Trump and the words “Make Aircrew Great Again” — a play on his campaign slogan — on their flight suits.
“If this was requested, it would have been highly unusual, and someone in uniform needed to have a more questioning attitude,” said Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a retired aircraft carrier strike group commander in Japan who later served on Senator McCain’s committee staff. Critics said Mr. Trump’s animus for Mr. McCain set off a cascade of decisions by lower-level officials that not only dishonored the senator’s memory but also disrespected the sailors who serve on the McCain. In addition to Mr. McCain, the ship is named after his grandfather, John S. McCain Sr., a Navy admiral during World War II, and his father, John S. McCain Jr., an admiral in the Vietnam War era.
Even as Mr. Trump insisted he never would have pulled such a stunt, he repeated his reasons for why he disliked Mr. McCain. “It’s beyond petty,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “It’s disgraceful and the White House should be embarrassed.”
“John McCain killed health care for the Republican Party, and he killed health care for the nation,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday, a reference to the late senator’s critical vote against the president’s health care proposal in July 2017. The McCain had already suffered tragedy. The ship, which fired missiles during the Iraq war and survived cat-and-mouse games with Chinese vessels in the South China Sea, was docked at the base in Yokosuka for repairs after a deadly crash off the coast of Singapore and Malaysia in August 2017, when it collided with a merchant marine vessel. Ten sailors died in the accident.
He also said Mr. McCain had carried “a lot” of responsibility for former President George W. Bush’s decision “to go into the Middle East, which was a catastrophe.” Mr. McCain took a personal interest in the ship, visiting it in 2015 in Vietnam, where he had been held as a prisoner of war. Cmdr. Micah Murphy, who took command of the ship after the accident, once served as a legislative fellow to the senator. He declined to comment on Thursday.
Mr. Trump regularly lashed out at Mr. McCain while the senator was alive and has remained critical since he died. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump also dismissed Mr. McCain’s service in Vietnam, where he was held as a war prisoner, saying he was not a hero. “I like people who weren’t captured,” Mr. Trump said in 2015. Mr. Trump said he would not have ordered the ship to be hidden, but he declined to apologize to the sailors who had been kept out of his speech. And he expressed sympathy for the motivations of his staff.
Just last month, Mr. Trump repeated one of his favorite insults — that Mr. McCain finished “last in his class” at the Naval Academy (Mr. McCain actually graduated fifth from the bottom). “Now, somebody did it because they thought I didn’t like him, O.K.?” Mr. Trump told reporters. “They were well meaning, I will say. I didn’t know anything about it. I would never have done that.”
“It’s beyond petty — it’s disgraceful and the White House should be embarrassed,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee and a West Point graduate, said in a statement to The New York Times about Mr. Trump’s latest round of insults. “So, I wasn’t a fan of John McCain — I never will be,” he added. “But certainly, I couldn’t care less whether or not there’s a boat named after his father.”
“It’s clear that Mr. Trump doesn’t understand service or sacrifice, and our service members deserve better,” Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado who served as an Army Ranger in Iraq, said in a Twitter post. Mr. Trump repeated his reasons for why he disliked Mr. McCain.
Representative Jim Langevin, Democrat of Rhode Island, said, “It speaks volumes that the president’s staff would dishonor an American hero to protect the president’s ego.” “John McCain killed health care for the Republican Party, and he killed health care for the nation,” Mr. Trump said, a reference to the late senator’s critical vote against the president’s health care proposal in July 2017.
Critics faulted Mr. Trump for what they said was a petty war of words against Mr. McCain, who died last year of brain cancer. They also derided him for what they said were his attempts to divide the military.
“We have a long history of keeping our military apolitical,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee who is a former Pentagon official. “The president’s team felt it was appropriate to politicize this event.”
The email from the White House urging the Navy to move the McCain or make sure it was out of sight put officials in a difficult position. The McCain is still undergoing repairs, and moving it from its berth would be tremendously difficult, time consuming and set back the repair schedule.
Navy officials struggled to explain why a tarp was hung over the ship’s name, and later, where the president was scheduled to visit. The tarp, they said, was part of efforts to repair the hull; the barge was a painting barge.
But other officials offered a different account. They said the initial decisions were made by midlevel officers in Japan, working with the White House advance team. The tarp and barge were removed after more senior Navy officials, in Japan and at the Indo-Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii, thought better of complying with the White House request.
There were similar questions about the status of the sailors. Two ships at the base did not participate in the president’s visit: the McCain and the Stethem. Their sailors were given 96-hour weekend liberty for Memorial Day. Sailors from the other ships did not get the long liberty.
Officials claimed there was not room for all of the sailors to hear Mr. Trump on the Wasp, an amphibious assault vessel. But they did not explain why the McCain and Stethem were excluded, arguing only that ships were selected to have a broad representation of the sailors on the base. The Navy said that if any sailors were turned away from the Wasp, it was because the space on that ship was scarce.
Defenders of Mr. Trump said it was hard to image that he would penalize sailors because of his feelings for Mr. McCain.
“I expect he would see the sailors on the ship and want to talk to them,” Mr. Keane said, “and deflect the fact that the ship is named after Senator McCain.”
But other former military officers were withering in their condemnation of the White House and of the Navy’s role. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired Army general who served in the Clinton administration, said on Twitter that if Mr. Shanahan knew about the White House’s order, he should resign.
Democrats vying to challenge Mr. Trump in 2020 lost no time in seizing on the episode.
“John McCain was a war hero, should be treated as a war hero, anything less than that is beneath anyone who doesn’t treat him that way,” Mr. Biden said to reporters in Delaware.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, said: “This is not a show. Our military is not a prop. Ships and sailors are not to be toyed with for the benefit of a fragile president’s ego.”