When a billionaire celebrity like Donald Trump gets it into his head that he is qualified to run for president, he has the right to do so. With his personal fortune, he is quite capable of sustaining a campaign independently, and his…I believe the media’s current favorite epithet is “bombastic” personality, is bound to attract plenty of attention. Whether or not you agree with his politics, this is all part of what makes America, America.

Just last week, Trump put in an appearance at a political event in Iowa. While there, the line of questioning turned to Arizona Senator John McCain, with whom Trump has had several bitter back-and-forths in the media recently. Trump could have used this moment to expand on his message of “fighting the establishment,” he could have illustrated where his views differ with Washington power players, he could have even extended an olive branch to the Senator – showing that he is capable of rising above intra-party conflict.

Donald Trump did none of those things.

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said, when discussion Senator McCain’s service in Vietnam. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Senator McCain served as a Navy pilot, having requested a combat assignment upon enlistment. He flew a ground-attack jet during Operation Rolling Thunder – some of the hottest days of the war. While flying one mission, his plane was shot down and thirty-one year-old Lieutenant Commander McCain was captured by the Vietcong. He spent over five years in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” prison. He was routinely beaten, starved and subject to torture that I can’t even wrap my head around. When his father was named commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese offered to release him. John McCain refused to leave imprisonment unless all the men who had been there before him were released as well. By the time he was finally returned home with the other POWs in 1973, McCain was permanently disabled and had to undergo months of recovery therapy.

Donald Trump spent the war years receiving four student draft deferments while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Upon graduation, he applied for and received a medical deferment for a bone spur in his foot.

But John McCain is not a war hero in Trump’s book.

Now, I could spend time asking why Donald Trump feels qualified to run for president with his resume of real estate dealings in his father’s company and hosting a cable game show. I could ask why Donald Trump feels he has the right to attack other Republicans as sellouts of the conservative cause after donating thousands to the Democratic Senatorial and Congressional Campaign Committees as well as to Democratic politicians – including Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign. I could ask why Donald Trump feels that he can call himself a savvy operator when he is vying for a spot to run against Secretary Clinton in a matchup that all respected national polls show him losing in a landslide.

But I won’t. Instead, I want to ask why Donald Trump thinks he would make a good commander-in-chief when he has demonstrated such outrageous disrespect towards a veteran of our armed forces; a man who underwent trials the likes of which few have ever seen, all in the name of country. How can Trump insult that sort of man and then claim he is qualified to be commander in chief?

I would also like to ask why the media has decided to lend credit to Trump’s quixotic and blatantly self-serving campaign. Why he is even mentioned in the same breath as serious Republican candidates is news to me.

Everyone in this great country of ours has a right to free expression. The right to hold any opinion on any issue and to promote that view in any manner that does not infringe on the ability of others to exercise their right to do the same. No matter how offensive, factually questionable, or just downright foolish we may think another’s opinion, we must respect their right to hold it.

But we don’t have to give them a microphone.