Talk radio host Chip Franklin has made no secret of his disdain for President Donald Trump, and he expressed that disdain during a Fox News appearance on Sunday by holding up a photo of the late Sen. John McCain.
Franklin has been weighing in on the controversy surrounding reports that someone in the White House hid the USS John McCain, a U.S. Navy warship, during Trump’s recent visit to Japan — where the president met with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. There was no love lost between Trump and the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, who died of brain cancer in August 2018 — and someone in the White House reportedly wanted to keep the USS John McCain out of sight when Trump was in Japan. Trump, however, has denied that the warship was hidden on his orders, although he said that if someone in the White House did conceal it, they were probably “well-meaning.”
Discussing the controversy outside the White House last week, Trump said of McCain, “I wasn’t a fan.” Trump bitterly resented McCain for, among other things, helping to derail a GOP-sponsored Obamacare replacement bill in 2017 — and McCain was highly critical of Trump during the president’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland in July 2018.
When Franklin was asked, on Fox News, why he was holding up a photo of McCain, he said that was his way of honoring McCain, Sound Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (who is running for president in the 2020 Democratic primary) and others who have “served this country.”
On Twitter, Franklin responded to White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s statement that it wasn’t “unreasonable” for someone in the White House to hide the USS John McCain during Trump’s Japan visit. Franklin posted that he wanted Trump “to see the hero he will never be.”
The USS John McCain has been named after three generations of men named John McCain. Initially, it was named after the Arizona senator’s father and grandfather, but in 2018, it was rededicated to honor Sen. McCain as well.