The widow of late U.S. Senator John McCain has endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
“There’s only one candidate in this race who stands up for our values as a nation, and that is Joe Biden,” Cindy McCain wrote in a tweet.
McCain wrote that her late husband, who died of brain cancer in 2018, “lived by a code: country first.” She wrote that while her family is Republican, they are “Americans foremost.”
“Joe and I don’t always agree on the issues, and I know he and John certainly had some passionate arguments, but he is a good and honest man,” she tweeted. “He will lead us with dignity.”
Read More: Former President Barack Obama delivers touching eulogy to late Senator John McCain
McCain wrote that Biden will be a great leader of the military because “he knows what it is like to send a child off to fight.”
Biden’s son, Beau, served as an officer in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
Her husband was a decorated war veteran, and three of her children have served in the military. John McCain volunteered for combat duty during the Vietnam War and spent 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war after being shot down during a bombing run over North Vietnam.
President Donald Trump famously slammed John McCain in 2015 during his run for the presidency. He said that McCain was “not a war hero.”
“He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said.
Read More: John McCain says U.S. leadership was better under Obama
Biden embraced the endorsement, saying that McCain is endorsing him because of the comments that the president allegedly made about Americans in the military who died at war, calling them “losers” and “suckers.” He has denied the claims.
The endorsement is not entirely unexpected. Last year, Trump complained that he hadn’t been properly thanked for the longtime senator’s services: “I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted. Which, as president, I had to approve. I don’t care about this — I didn’t get a thank you. That’s OK. We sent him on the way, but I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”
Meghan McCain, the senator’s daughter and co-host of The View, has not announced her endorsement.
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