John McCain’s Son Changes Voter Registration to Democrat and Backs Kamala Harris After Trump Arlington Controversy: ‘It Just Blows Me Away’

Jimmy McCain , the youngest son of the late John McCain , endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris while delivering a sharp rebuke of former President Donald Trump over his photo op at Arlington National Cemetery last week.

McCain, whose father was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008 and became a political icon as a “maverick” who would reach across the aisle in the Senate, spoke exclusively with CNN’s Natasha Bertrand in an interview published on Tuesday. He revealed that he not only plans to vote for Harris over Republican nominee Trump, but he also switched his party affiliation to Democrat and vowed to “get involved in any way I could” to help get her elected.

His words for Trump, however, were much less supportive. Addressing the Arlington incident, McCain told Bertrand:

“It just blows me away,” McCain, who has served in the military for 17 years, told CNN. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” of whether to be a backdrop for a political campaign, he said.

“I just think that for anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently — that it’s not about you there. It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country.”

McCain also raised suspicion that Trump is insecure about his own lack of military service as a past and potential commander-in-chief:

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

But McCain’s reverence for Arlington exists on several levels. Not only are members of his own family buried there — his grandfather and great-grandfather are buried in Arlington — he has a direct connection with other fallen servicemembers:

McCain’s anger over the Arlington episode was also particularly acute because when it happened, he had just returned from a seven-month deployment to a small US base on the Jordan-Syria border known as Tower 22.

He arrived there just weeks after three US service members were killed on the base in a drone attack by Iran-backed militants, and he says he thought of them when he saw Trump posing last Monday in front of gravestones.

“It was a violation,” McCain said. “That mother, that sister, those families, see that — and it’s a painful experience.”

McCain told Bertrand that his views are only his own and don’t represent those of the U.S. Army. Last week, the Secretary of the Army offered its own statement about Trump’s photo op in which it defended the cemetery employee who was “unfairly attacked” by Trump staffers in the media after the reported scuffle during last Monday’s incident. No charges were filed.

Watch the video above via CNN.