Rep. Peter King said Monday that he's not one of the people who took shots at Donald Trump over the years, because "to me, he was a New Yorker who sometimes went too far," but the outspoken GOP candidate's comments about Sen. John McCain "crossed a line" and will likely hurt Trump's chances at winning the White House.
"What he did over the weekend with John McCain, that has crossed a line," the New York Republican told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "To me, that's almost sacrilegious. There's certain things you just don't do. Apart from the politics, it's morally wrong."
Trump has been under fire from the large GOP field — with the notable exception of Ted Cruz — after saying on Saturday that Arizona Sen. John
McCain is "not a war hero" and a "loser." McCain was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for more than five years.
Trump said he was making the comments after McCain called the thousands of supporters who turned out for a Trump appearance in Phoenix "crazies," and has been pointing out that he also said that McCain "is a war hero" just minutes later.
On Monday, King told the "Morning Joe" show that he was at a baseball game in Brooklyn on Sunday, and several veterans came to him to voice their anger over Trump's statements.
"You and I have been involved in name calling over the years," he told host Joe Scarborough, a former lawmaker. "To me, if you're in the arena, a lot goes on. And you shouldn't complain about it. [But] when it comes to a person who is a POW [prisoner of war], who suffered the way John McCain did, and who doesn't brag about it or talk about it, for him to be attacked by Donald Trump was wrong. Morally wrong."
And for that, King said, Trump owes McCain "a full apology."
Meanwhile, King said he does not expect Trump to lose much of the "hard-core, anti-immigrant people," but to "the rank-and-file, the blue-collar people, the people who are proud to be Americans, this is really crossing a line."
That's going to damage Trump "permanently," King said, because "it makes it impossible for him to go beyond now a hard-core base.
But before the statements about McCain, Trump was speaking out, and while King said he doesn't agree with everything he was saying, "we need somebody who has the guts to speak out, who is not bought and sold by others. So he was really getting the benefit of a bombastic personality and being willing to speak out as to specifics."
After crossing the McCain line, though, "I don't see how he recovers from that, even though I do believe he's going to hold on to a certain base."