WASHINGTON: Donald Trump has sacked an aide who said cancer-stricken Senator John McCain’s opposition to a presidential nominee did not matter because “he’s dying anyway,” the White House announced Tuesday.
The White House was roiled by bipartisan fury over the remark attributed to Kelly Sadler in May.
“Kelly Sadler is no longer employed within the Executive Office of the President,” read a brief statement by deputy White House spokesman Raj Shah.
McCain, 81, had indicated he opposed the nomination of now CIA Director nominee Gina Haspel over her role in enhanced interrogation techniques under president George W. Bush.
The Arizona senator, who was held prisoner and tortured during the Vietnam War, is battling brain cancer.
CNN had quoted a White House official as saying Sadler, speaking at a staff meeting, meant the comment as a joke but that it flopped.
Another extraordinary attack against McCain that stunned Washington came around the same time from a fellow veteran, retired US Air Force lieutenant general Thomas McInerney, who said torture works because it made McCain spill sensitive information to his captors during his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
The attacks, remarkable for their bluntness, triggered swift reaction from across the political spectrum, with lawmakers demanding an apology from Trump that never came.
Meghan McCain, a conservative commentator on ABC’s popular morning talk show “The View,” delivered an eloquent defense of her father, who is battling brain cancer at home in Arizona.
“I don’t understand what kind of environment you’re working in when that would be acceptable and then you can come to work the next day and still have a job,” she said at the time.
Her father is “all about character and bipartisanship and something greater than yourself,” Meghan McCain said, before adding a stinging message to the critics: “Nobody’s going to remember you.”
Members of Congress also rallied behind their ailing, war-hero colleague.
Trump, for his part, once mocked McCain’s war service, saying during the presidential campaign that “I like people that weren’t captured.”
Trump fires aide who joked about ‘dying’ war hero John McCain
Trump fires aide who joked about ‘dying’ war hero John McCain
- Kelly Sadler is no longer employed within the Executive Office of the President
- Lawmakers demanding an apology from Trump that never came
Trump invites Colombia’s Petro to White House after earlier threat of military action
- Relations between Trump and Petro have been frosty since the Republican returned to the White House in January 2025
WASHINGTON/BOGOTA: Days after threatening Colombia with military action, US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said arrangements were being made for the country’s President Gustavo Petro to visit the White House, following a call between the two leaders. Trump and Petro said they discussed relations between the two countries in their first call since the US president on Sunday said that a US military operation focused on Colombia’s government “sounds good” to him. That threat followed Trump ordering the US capture of the president of neighboring Venezuela, who was flown to the US to face drug and weapons charges.
“It was a great honor to speak with the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who called to explain the situation of drugs and other disagreements that we have had. I appreciated his call and tone, and look forward to meeting him in the near future,” Trump wrote on social media.
Trump added “arrangements are being made” for a meeting in Washington between himself and Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, but gave no specific date for a meeting.
“We have spoken by phone for the first time since he became president,” Petro told supporters gathered at a rally in Bogota meant to celebrate Colombia’s sovereignty, adding he had requested a restart of dialogue between the two countries.
A source in Petro’s office told Reuters the call was “cordial” and “respectful.”
Relations between Trump and Petro have been frosty since the Republican returned to the White House in January 2025.
Trump has repeatedly accused the administration of Petro, without evidence, of enabling a steady flow of cocaine into the US, imposing sanctions on the Colombian leader in October.
On Sunday Trump referred to Petro as “a sick man, who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.”
The US in September had revoked Petro’s visa after he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in New York following a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly and called on US soldiers to “disobey the orders of Trump.”
Petro, who has been a vocal opponent of Israel’s war in Gaza, had accused Trump of being “complicit in genocide” in Gaza and called for “criminal proceedings” over US missile attacks on suspected drug-running boats in Caribbean waters.
The Trump administration has carried out more than 30 strikes against suspected drug boats since September, in a campaign that has killed at least 110 people.
