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Politics

Donald Trump Uses Old Al Franken POW Joke About John McCain

Franken 15 years ago: "I don't buy the war hero thing. Anybody can be captured."

Jesse Walker | 7.18.2015 2:18 PM

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Trump looks in the mirror and sees…hmm, that was unexpected.
NBC

Everyone—and by "everyone" I mean "a bunch of guys on my Twitter feed"—is up in arms about something Donald Trump said today about John McCain:

He's not a war hero….He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured.

And then he reiterated the point:

I don't buy the war hero thing. Anybody can be captured. I thought the idea was to capture them. As far as I'm concerned he sat out the war.

Oh, wait. Sorry. That second quote came from Al Franken 15 years ago. So that's where Trump gets his material.

Bill Kristol says if Trump doesn't apologize for his McCain crack, this will be the "beginning of the end" for his presidential campaign. Given Kristol's spotty record as a prognosticator, that might be a good reason to expect Trump to stick around a long time. But if he is on his way out, maybe he'll head to the Senate instead.

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NEXT: Civil Libertarian Rand Paul Becomes the Frontman for a Notorious Racial Profiling and Surveillance Program

Jesse Walker is books editor at Reason and the author of Rebels on the Air and The United States of Paranoia.

PoliticsDonald TrumpJohn McCainAl FrankenElection 2016Vietnam
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