(Photo courtesy of the Office of Sen. John McCain)

Sen. John McCain

(Photo by Jim Cole/AP via NPR)

Donald Trump

After 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney blasted Donald Trump as a “phony and a fraud,” the 2008 nominee from Arizona has joined him in condemning their party’s front runner, Donald Trump.

Sen. John McCain is appealing to Republican voters to reject Trump's candidacy after Trump went after Arizona's 79-year-old senior senator as he began his campaign last July, rejecting McCain's status as a war hero after spending more than five years in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp.

“He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero? He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured, I hate to tell ya,” Trump said at the time.

Since those comments, McCain has said he would support the party’s nominee and today said he’d continue to do so. But in statement, he strongly urged GOP voters to look past Trump, telling them to "think long and hard about who they want to be our next commander in chief."

McCain also shared Romney’s concerns about Trump’s dishonesty, citing a growing group of 70 fellow Republican defense and foreign policy leaders who’ve spoken out against what he termed as uninformed and dangerous statements on national security.

“At a time when our world has never been more complex or more in danger, as we watch the threatening actions of a neo-imperial Russia, an assertive China, an expansionist Iran, an insane North Korean ruler, and terrorist movements that are metastasizing across the Middle East and Africa, I want Republican voters to pay close attention to what our party's most respected and knowledgeable leaders and national security experts are saying about Mr. Trump, and to think long and hard about who they want to be our next commander in chief and leader of the free world,” McCain said in his statement.