CNN
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When former President Donald Trump held a campaign rally at Arlington National Cemetery last week, First Lieutenant Jimmy McCain said he viewed it as a “violation.”

The youngest son of the late Senator John McCain had already turned away from the Republican Party. Just a few 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 now he is speaking out for the first time about Trump because of the former president’s behavior on the sacred ground where several generations of McCain’s family are buried, including his grandfather and great-grandfather.

“It just blows my mind,” McCain, who served 17 years in the military, told CNN. “These men and women lying there in the ground have no choice,” he said, about whether or not they want to serve as a backdrop for a political campaign.

“I just think that anyone who has served in uniform for a long time understands that instinctively – that it’s not about you. It’s about these people who made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country.”

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

It’s a significant move for the son of a former Republican 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 – no one other than Jimmy has publicly left the Republican Party.

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

Jimmy McCain, who joined the Marine Corps at age 17 and now serves as an intelligence officer with the 158th Infantry Regiment, has so far consciously tried to avoid political controversy. Trump’s attacks on his father – saying he was “not a war hero” because he was captured in Vietnam – and his alleged description of the elder McCain as a “loser” – were deeply hurtful on a personal level, but not politically inappropriate, Jimmy McCain believes.

“One thing about John McCain is that he chose a public life,” McCain said. “So attacking him is not outside his job description.”

For the younger McCain, however, the events at Arlington and the campaign’s response to them represent a whole new dimension in what he sees as Trump’s disrespect for the fallen – and he believes that disrespect stems from Trump’s own insecurities about not having served.

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

McCain stressed that he was speaking on his own behalf and that his views did not represent those of the U.S. Army. McCain received his commission and became an officer in the U.S. Army Intelligence Service in 2022.

McCain’s anger over the events in Arlington was particularly great because at the time of these incidents he had just returned from a seven-month deployment to a small US base called Tower 22 on the Jordanian-Syrian border.

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

“It was a violation,” McCain said. “For this mother, this sister, these families to see this – and it’s a painful experience.”

Trump visited the cemetery last Monday after laying a wreath to honor the 13 U.S. service members killed in 2021 at the Abbey Gate of Kabul airport in Afghanistan. His campaign team filmed the visit, which led to an altercation with a cemetery worker who tried to prevent Trump’s team from taking photos and filming in the area where the latest U.S. casualties are buried. According to the Army, this violates federal law, Army regulations and Department of Defense policies.

Trump is not the first politician to violate a ban on political activity at Arlington. Over 20 years ago, John McCain even said he made “a very bad mistake” when he released a campaign ad that showed a clip of him walking through the cemetery.

Trump and his campaign team, however, have not issued such a mea culpa. Instead, according to the US Army, they ignored and “abruptly pushed aside” a cemetery worker who protested the action and later released footage of the event anyway. One of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, called the Army a “bungler” and said it was “100 percent a fabricated story.”

Over the weekend, the Trump campaign released recorded statements from family members of some of the soldiers killed at Abbey Gate, who said they invited Trump to visit their loved ones’ graves. But the campaign’s video of the event, which they posted on TikTok, also showed other gravestones – including that of an Army Special Forces soldier who died by suicide and whose family said they did not give the campaign permission to film it.

For his part, McCain is now preparing to become more involved this election cycle. Although he has been an advocate for veterans’ interests for years, he admits that his recent policy shift was deeply personal.

“John McCain was my father, and a lot of people forget that in the small stuff,” 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 from the moment I could remember was that he was a good man and that he did his part. And being with him toward the end of his life and hearing things (from Trump) like, he was a loser because he got captured – I don’t think I could ever forget that.”