Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry said Saturday that Donald Trump should be disqualified from being a White House candidate and commander-in-chief if he does not apologize to Sen. John McCain for slamming his prisoner status during the Vietnam War.
"I was highly offended what Donald Trump said about John McCain and his years of sacrifice in a dirty, dingy, terrible prison in North Vietnam," the former Texas governor told pollster and host Frank Luntz at the start of their interview at the 2015 Iowa Family Leadership Summit in Ames. "Donald Trump owes every American veteran, and in particular John McCain, an apology."
Then Luntz asked: "If Donald Trump does not apologize to John McCain, do you feel that that disqualifies him as a legitimate presidential candidate?"
" … And as the commander-in-chief of this country, in one word, yes," Perry responded.
Perry's rebuke was among many from other 2016 GOP candidates Saturday after Trump blasted McCain's Vietnam record and later calling him a "loser" at the Iowa summit.
"He’s not a war hero,"
Trump said earlier Saturday. "He’s a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren’t captured. ... Perhaps he is a war hero, but right now, he said some very bad things about a lot of people."
McCain was held in captivity for nearly six years after his Navy plane was shot down by the Viet Cong. He was held in North Vietnan's "Hanoi Hilton" prison, where he was repeatedly tortured.
He spent two years in solitary confinement.
The 2008 GOP Republican presidential candidate ignited the feud with Trump when he told The New Yorker on Thursday that
Trump had "fired up the crazies" at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, last weekend.
"There was an individual who sat upon this stage earlier today who doesn't understand or don't care — doesn't care about people who serve this country," Perry said in beginning his rebuff of Trump.
"To disparage a legitimate American hero like John McCain — you may disagree with his politics, and that's fine," he continued. "But don't question the men and women of the military who sacrificed and sometimes paid a huge price for our safety and our freedom and our economics."
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