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How McCain Got the Last Word Against Trump (archive)
By the time he died on Saturday, Mr. McCain had carefully stage-managed a four-day celebration of his life — but what was also an unmistakable rebuke to President Trump and his agenda. For years, Mr. Trump had used Twitter and the presidential bully pulpit to mock and condemn the senator. In death, Mr. McCain found a way to have the last word, even quietly making it clear through friends that Mr. Trump was not welcome at the services.
“I think it’s fair to say that they have a very different view of this country and what this country means, here and abroad,” said Mark Salter, the senator’s longtime friend and co-author who sat with Mr. McCain — often with a lump in his throat — during the many discussions about his looming death. “His overall message was: ‘It doesn’t have to be this shitty.’”
The series of events honoring Mr. McCain is the kind of grandiose spectacle that is normally reserved for someone who became president, not someone who twice failed to do so. Friends said that Mr. McCain was surprised by the level of interest in his death even as he planned it.
When advisers suggested that his coffin should lie in state at the Arizona Capitol, Mr. McCain said he believed the legislature would never approve such a rare honor for him, recalled Rick Davis, who had been at Mr. McCain’s side for decades and served as his 2008 campaign chairman. “Every inch of the way, he underestimated what he thought this would be about,” Mr. Davis said.
The memorial events this week began in Arizona on Wednesday, when Mr. McCain’s body was taken to the Capitol, and will continue Thursday at a service at North Phoenix Baptist Church. The procession will then shift to the nation’s capital, when Mr. McCain’s coffin will arrive at an air base outside Washington as the president holds one of his raucous campaign-style rallies for supporters in Indiana.
By the weekend, when virtually all of official Washington — Democrats and Republicans alike — gathers at the National Cathedral for a nationally televised farewell, Mr. Trump is expected to have retreated to Camp David, where White House aides hope he will contain his anger at the attention being lavished on Mr. McCain.
[...] Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian activist who survived two poisoning attempts for his opposition to the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, said that Mr. McCain, who was widely seen as one of the Russian leader’s fiercest detractors, had also asked him in April to be a pallbearer. “He spoke the truth regardless of party or political situations,” Mr. Kara-Murza said. “That was his defining characteristic.”
In Washington, a town where Mr. Trump has given Mr. Putin an open invitation to visit, Mr. Kara-Murza said that Mr. McCain’s choice of a Russian pallbearer — one repeatedly brought to the brink of death for challenging his country’s authoritarian brand of politics — was “actually pretty symbolic.”
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Thursday August 30 2018, @09:17PM
Here's the thing. I am not concerned about Trump being unhappy with, angry at, disappointed in, etc., John McCain. None of the concerns I am describing--and that the Trumpers are taking issue with--have anything to do with whether John McCain is a saint or a sinner.
TFA points out Trump having difficulty trying to
(emphasis added).
It's not a problem with McCain being a great guy and a war hero, nor about McCain being reviled and disliked troublemaker. It's about the fact that the President of the United States of America is spiteful and emotionally unsophisticated and petty enough to be, quoting my post above,
The guy is angry that a bunch of people are mourning someone who died, and celebrating his life. That's not (just) disrespect of McCain, but rather, shows active contempt for the thousands of people to whom McCain's passing was seen as a loss.
Look, some people are nice, some are jerks, that's life. But if someone (be they nice or jerk) dies, and others miss them, that's just something that happens and that should be respected even if you didn't personally like or value the dearly departed. Responding to that with anger instead of respect, regardless of the level of give-a-damn about the dearly departed in question, is frankly disturbingly aberrant.
Disturbingly aberrant is a phrase that might be thrown around as hyperbole describing Trump's approach to a lot of things, but here I use the phrase to mean that the behavior is aberrant in a disturbing way, in the literal sense. It's concerning.