"I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back and it won’t be pretty," President Donald Trump said. | Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images Trump and McCain smack at each other over 'spurious nationalism' comments

President Donald Trump on Tuesday slapped at Sen. John McCain's condemnation the previous night of “spurious nationalism,” warning the Arizona Republican that "at some point I fight back and it won’t be pretty.”

“Well it’s a shocker,” the president told radio host Chris Plante in response to a question about McCain’s comments. “Yeah, well I hear it and people have to be careful because at some point I fight back. You know, I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back and it won’t be pretty.”


The Arizona senator brushed off the apparent threat. “It’s fine with me," McCain told reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. "I’ve faced some fairly significant adversaries in the past.”

The latest public sparring between the two men comes after McCain, who was awarded the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal Monday night in Philadelphia, used his acceptance speech to denounce “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.” Such a worldview, the longtime Republican lawmaker said, “is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

The remarks were widely interpreted as a shot at Trump’s political style, a mix of nationalism, populism and conservatism. McCain on Tuesday morning, however, denied that it was an explicit whack at the president.

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"I was referring to the whole atmosphere and environment," McCain said, noting that Trump is not the first politician to use "America First" language. "No, there’s a whole lot of people besides the president who have said ‘America First.'"

The two men have been at odds often throughout Trump’s brief but meteoric political career, perhaps most notably when the president suggested that McCain was “not a hero” even though he had been tortured as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War because, Trump said, “I like people who weren’t captured.”

The relationship between the two men hit a more recent low over the summer, when McCain’s opposition to Republican legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare twice scuttled those efforts. Trump indicated Tuesday that McCain’s opposition had not been forgotten as Republicans work to put a policy victory on the board ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

“I think we’ll have a lot done. We need some votes from some of the Republicans that for some reason they weren’t there on healthcare,” the president said. “They should have been. We thought we had it, but John McCain voted no, which was a shocker.”

McCain, too, said he would vote with the president's agenda when it matched his own, scoffing at the notion that his personal feud with Trump might keep him from supporting legislation backed by the White House.

“Why would you say something that stupid? Why would you ask something that dumb? Huh?" McCain said. "My job is United States senator, a senator from Arizona, which I was just reelected to. To mean that I’m somehow going to behave in a way that I’m going to block everything because of some personal disagreement? That’s a dumb question.”

Seung Min Kim contributed to this story.