Trump issues warning to McCain after senator's tough speech

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump today issued a warning shot after Republican Sen. John McCain questioned "half-baked, spurious nationalism" in America's foreign policy.

Trump said in a radio interview with WMAL in Washington that "people have to be careful because at some point I fight back." The president added, "I'm being very, very nice but at some point I fight back and it won't be pretty."

McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent 5½ years in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp and is battling brain cancer, offered a simple response to Trump: "I have faced tougher adversaries."

In Philadelphia on Monday night, the six-term Republican senator from Arizona received an award for a lifetime of service and sacrifice to the country. In addition to recalling his more than two decades of military service and his imprisonment during the war, McCain took a moment to go a step further than the night's other speakers, who lamented what many described as a fractured political climate.

"To abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems," he said, "is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history."

He continued: "We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil."

Former Vice President Joe Biden presented McCain with the Liberty Medal. Though members of opposing parties, the two men worked together during their time in the Senate.