John McCain Is Taking On Donald Trump Without Regret
John McCain has been standing out from his fellow Republicans largely by unleashing on President Trump, and it is unlikely to end anytime soon.
While most of the Republican Party continues to remain silent in the face of the near-daily outrages from President Trump, John McCain is apparently feeling liberated enough to speak out:
WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain, the sometimes cantankerous, often charming and eternally irrepressible Republican from Arizona, has never minced words. But in the twilight of a long and storied career, as he fights a virulent form of brain cancer, the 81-year-old senator has found a new voice.
In twin speeches — one in July, where he issued a call to bipartisanship in the Senate, and another in Philadelphia this past week, where he railed against “half-baked, spurious nationalism” — Mr. McCain has taken on both his colleagues and President Trump. In the process, his friends and fellow senators say, he has carved out a new role for himself on Capitol Hill: elder statesman and truth-teller.
“Even if John were not ill, with his experience and age, there is a part of you that I think begins to focus on your legacy,” said former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a close friend of Mr. McCain’s. But with cancer, Mr. Biden said, “he’s in the fight of his life, and he knows it.”
Having won re-election last year, Mr. McCain was already free to speak his mind. Were he to run again in 2022, he would be 86, and friends say that his 2016 campaign was almost certainly his last.
But colleagues see a shift since his diagnosis.
“Do I hear in his voice a little bit more expression of grander ideals? I do,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. “With all that’s happened to him, and the knowledge of where he is, I sense a little bit more of that.”
In Philadelphia, the National Constitution Center awarded Mr. McCain its Liberty Medal, honoring his lifetime of public service. The senator’s acceptance speech was a treatise on his expansive view of America’s role in the world — a role that, he fears, is being diminished by Mr. Trump’s leadership.
“The international order we helped build from the ashes of world war, and that we defend to this day, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history,” Mr. McCain said.
He went on to deplore as “unpatriotic” those who would “abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe,” in favor of “some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”
The speech grew out of a book Mr. McCain is writing with Mark Salter, his longtime speechwriter and co-author. It was not aimed directly at Mr. Trump, Mr. Salter said, but at the philosophy of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, and his hard-charging right-wing website, Breitbart News.
“In my view, and McCain’s too, these guys at Breitbart are crackpots,” Mr. Salter said.
Another element of the speech — Mr. McCain’s gratitude for a life well lived — was equally important to the senator, Mr. Salter added, but it got lost in the media frenzy around the address.
Mr. Biden said he took the speech as a pointed message, if not to Mr. Trump, then to the nation. “I think he was delivering a message to the country, to his colleagues and to any of the opinion makers that would listen, and that is, ‘Look, this is serious stuff, our role in the world is not guaranteed, democracy is not guaranteed, we know how to do this and, damn it, we’d better focus and know what’s at stake.'”
The president, though, took it personally.
“People have to be careful, because at some point, I fight back,” Mr. Trump said in a radio interview with WMAL in Washington. “I’m being nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point, I fight back, and it won’t be pretty.”
To which Mr. McCain, a former Navy captain who was tortured during more than five years as a prisoner in Vietnam, shot back: “I have faced tougher adversaries.”
Mr. Biden found the tit-for-tat laughable. “The idea that Trump is going to intimidate John McCain? Give me a break,” he said.
Mr. McCain, who was the Republican nominee for president in 2008, has never been a fan of Mr. Trump, who once derisively referred to the senator’s time as a prisoner of war by saying, “I like people who weren’t captured.” During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. McCain at first grudgingly supported Mr. Trump, and then revoked his endorsement after the release of an “Access Hollywood” tape in which Mr. Trump boasted that he had sexually assaulted women.
Now, “there’s not a relationship” between the two men, said John Weaver, a Republican strategist who is close to Mr. McCain. “It’s not like they had one that got soured, or they had one that has not improved. There is not one.”
In a brief hallway conversation in a Capitol corridor this past week, Mr. McCain put it this way: “I’m doing what I think is right for the country. I don’t work for Donald Trump, and I don’t work for his administration.”
Here’s the video of McCain’s speech in Philadelphia referenced above:
McCain has long had a history of being outspoken and a ‘maverick’ against the general trends in his own political party, of course. It’s a reputation that he earned well before he ran for President for the first time in 2000, but which received significant national attention during his campaign that year for the Republican nomination. In particular, it played a large role in his somewhat surprising victory over eventual nominee George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary, a win that set the tone for what turned into a somewhat bitter campaign between the two men that turned nasty, at least at the surrogate level, on more than one occasion. McCain continued to play that role when he returned to the Senate and then again when he ran for President in 2008, especially when he stood up against the bigotry that some of his own supporters were displaying toward Barack Obama during the General Election that year. While there was much about McCain during that election to criticize, including his selection of a running mate and his somewhat bizarre “suspending my campaign” response to the September 2008 financial crisis, but that moment alone was a good demonstration that, in the end, McCain maintained the sense of decency and honor that he had become known for in the beginning.
More recently, of course, McCain has been in the news for other reasons and his diagnosis of a particularly virulent form of brain cancer seems to have had an impact on him that is having an interesting impact in Washington. Over the summer, of course, he became one of the most prominent opponents of the efforts by Republicans to ram a bill to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act through the Senate, including a dramatic late night return to the Senate shortly after his diagnosis during which he cast the deciding vote that killed the bill on the floor with a memorable thumbs-down that needed no explanation. He’s also been among the most outspoken critics of the Trump Administration of Capitol Hill, as his speech in Philadelphia demonstrates quite aptly, with some suggesting that McCain’s realization of his mortality and the fact that, regardless of the outcome of his battle against cancer, he’s unlikely to seek re-election in 2022. As a result, he feels far more liberated in speaking out than any of his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Much like the criticism that was obliquely aimed at Trump by former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in their speeches late last week, McCain is absolutely right on the substance of his criticisms of the times we live in and the manner in which the current President is seeking to even further divide the nation. While McCain followed the example of the two former Presidents in not naming Trump by name, there’s no mistaking who and what he was referring to in the address. Indeed, his reference to “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems” is a perfect description not only of Trump himself, but also many of his most prominent supporters, including former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has become even more outspoken than he was before upon his return to his former position at Breitbart News. Additionally, like the two former Presidents, McCain pushed back against Trump’s advocacy of protectionism and a foreign policy that seems adrift and content with relinquishing much of the influence that the United States has had around the globe since the end of World War Two. Notwithstanding that there are several aspects of McCain’s own policy position that are worthy of criticism, his critiques of Trumpism both in this speech and in other public comments has been particularly spot-on. If only his fellow Republicans displayed the same amount of courage.
“If only his fellow Republicans displayed the same amount of courage.”
If reelection opportunities, chances to grift, or enhanced power in the chamber came as a result of displaying more courage, his fellow Republicans would display more. As it is now, not so much.
If you’re a Republican politician, apparently you either have to be dying and/or not running for re-election before you will speak truth to power…
Look, I’ll take it. And there is a part of me that has always admired a part of John McCain. But I have to point out that it is really easy to display courage when you have nothing to lose (as he did in ‘Nam when all he was risking was a life he thought was already lost, and as he is now when his political career is over). But can you do it when you have everything to lose? (as he didn’t in 2000 and 2008). I would have to go back and re-evaluate all his actions and the times he did them in (which on a number of occasions took courage) but Jeff Flake has put his political career on the line in a way that McCain never did.
I don’t agree with Flake at least 75% of the time, but the man has earned my respect. The whole GOP has gone totally and completely bonkers, but his is a voice of reason, One that actually argues from principles, one that I could engage with. And he might (probably???) lose his seat for that fact.
John McCain has nothing left to lose.
Since the Reagan era I’ve watched Republican congress critters get fed up and speak their mind… and then leave office, letting a crazy take their seat. Close followers of this comment section know that I feel that 80 year old McCain is the closest thing we have to a sane, principled Republican, the last of an otherwise dead breed, but that he has been only an approximation of the real thing. Until the healthcare vote last month, although McCain would sometimes call BS on Republican insanity, he would inevitably cave on the vote so as to be a ‘team player’. For whatever reason he bucked that trend and stuck to his principles and for that I’m grateful.
It would be interesting if McCain ever comes clean about Palin. Steve Schmidt did a long time ago. I feel that, in many ways, Palinism was the precursor to Trumpism, and that if McCain had never made that fateful selection, there would be no President Trump today. I can’t prove it, but I believe it’s a distinct possibility. I suspect that a lot of the people who made up the Palin movement went on to be the people who pushed Trump toward victory in the GOP primaries.
While Palin didn’t engage in overt racism, she resorted to the very dogwhistles other-izing Obama that McCain had expressly tried to avoid during the campaign. She talked about “real America,” accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” and was reportedly upset at the McCain campaign’s refusal to bring up Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright.
She also pioneered a level of dishonesty that was unusual even for a politician. Politicians lie, but they’re usually cautious about it. Not her; she’d just boldly declare something to be true that was moronically easy to disprove, like when she responded to a report finding her guilty of ethics violations by claiming she had been “cleared of any legal wrongdoing…any hint of any kind of unethical activity,” and kept repeating this line even after a reporter pointed out to her that the report said no such thing, even quoting the relevant section that described her, in plain and unambiguous language, as guilty.
After the election she quit her governorship and launched a new career as a reality-TV star and right-wing media troll who commanded an army of followers on social media and utilized outrage as a tool for staying in the headlines. It was from this position that she popularized the “death panels” hoax and later led the resistance against the immigration bill. She would go one to become one of the first former elected officials to endorse Trump’s presidential bid.
Like Trump, Palin’s rise was in a large sense fueled by white racial panic against the first black president. Trump was more explicit about it, but it was there with Palin as well. Like Trump, a lot of the passion in her movement was unmoored from traditional conservative policies and focused more on cultural hot-button issues. She laid the groundwork that he would come to occupy.
No one is relinquishing U.S. leadership. Forces beyond our control in combination with decisions made over the last thirty years had already eroded it to non-existence. And frankly I don’t know what “democracy” is supposed to mean in the context of a government which has over many decades become increasingly autocratic, kleptocratic and insulated from the wishes of the governed. A government which practices legal slavery. A government which refuels Saudi warplanes so they can bomb civilians. A government which has gotten a million dead (and counting) across the Greater Middle East and relentlessly spends ever more on weapons while its children have their brains destroyed by contaminated drinking water.
Please excuse me if I don’t see John McCain as one goddamn jot better than Captain Cheetos, because he’s worked much as anyone to turn this country into a violent, third-world hellhole.
His “poor people get drafted, rich people got doctor’s notes for bone spurs” tonight was gold.
We probably would have been a lot better off if the GOP had nominated McCain in 2000 instead of George W. Bush. He’s never worshipped tax cuts as a false god and while McCain has a long history of militarism, at least he actually served and might have bristled at all the neocon warmongers who’ve never seen a day of basic training.
But we didn’t get McCain in 2000 and you can’t blame Donald Trump for that.
And no matter how much you may disdain or fear Trump, I hope you can appreciate this moment of clarity. Obama and Bush and McCain and Mataconis and Taylor have spelled it out for you. All they want to do and all they plan to do is maintain the status quo. So if you’re happy with that, by all means join them. But if you look at decades of stagnant wages and hideous income inequality, an endless future of war and desperately clinging to global hegemony, staggering amounts of debt with absolutely no idea what do to about it, an idiotic belief you can have identity politics for everyone except white people, and a now very public contempt for their fellow Americans and think that maybe there’s a better way…well, you still probably don’t want to be on Trump’s side. But you’d better make damn sure you don’t wind up siding with people who only want a world where there’s no place for you in it.
Mike
@MBunge:
At long last, a moment of clarity in Mike’s thoughts! Keep challenging your own thinking, Mike; you’re making progress!
@MBunge:
A: “maintain the status quo”>”flush everything down the crapper.”
B: You have as much idea of what they planned and tried to do as Ill Douchy has: zero, zip, nothing and goose egg.
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!! You write that as if the Orange Mange is planning on doing anything to correct any of those problems…that very public contempt you write about…your dear leader is the person heading up that very cause…your devotion to him is sickening…
@MBunge:
The latest on the Repub tax plan has state tax deductions and mortgages being taken away and the amount you could contribute pre-tax to your 401K slashed down to almost nothing. How in the hell is that a benefit to working and middle class America? It’s a complete and total FU to anyone who’s not filthy rich or over the age of retirement. It will absolutely devastate a generation that’s just getting to the point they can buy a house or start seriously saving for retirement after the student loans have gotten under control. The house market will tank once people realize that mortgages are a complete burden now with no alleviation in sight – why buy then when you can rent and not have to worry about the upkeep?
Trump voters totally sided with people who want a world where there’s no place for for them in it. They bought the BS hook, line and sinker because of nonsense like “libs hate you”, “minorities are stealing your jobs” or “globalists are ruining your life”. RICH PEOPLE are ruining their lives and they continue to give care blanche to their killers just because somebody told them the Other is trying to get rid of them and destroy their way of life. The GOP has been doing this for decades, and yes, McCain was a willing accomplice to try and get the Oval Office.
It’s nice he’s getting a conscious – we should always applaud people for standing up for morals. Kinda late in the game though and it doesn’t excuse that he helped gather kindling for this fire.
To be sure, the Republican Party is dynamic.
The Democratic Party? Not so much.
Taking on Donald Trump is now a proxy battle between: (1) the John McCain and Rob Corker types, they’re retiring or checking out, and have nothing to lose; and (2) the Steve Bannon Munich Beer Hall Putch types who are convinced that the Republican Party future is now, and a hostile takeover attempt is on.
@Kylopod:
I’m not sure what Schmidt said, but it was clear almost from the beginning that it was kind of a crapshoot on McCain’s part. I think he was smart enough to see that the country was ready for a charismatic but even-keeled young person of color to be President instead of another old white dude. The only real chance he had was to counteract with a female, even though the campaign hadn’t really vetted her.
All I’m saying here is that it was just meant as a last-ditch gamble to win the election; it just happened to have much bigger repercussions than most people would have predicted. Whether McCain admitted that to anybody including himself, I don’t know.
@Kylopod:
I don’t just think, I know that Palin was the precursor to Trump. The present-day Trumpkins are the former Palinistas. I’ve been saying this for ages.
Breitbart was their online cheerleader. Virtually every day while they still had delusions that Palin would run, Breitbart ran a hard-hitting “news” article about her most recent Facebook posting. When it became obvious–even to them–that Palin was too lazy to budge from Wasilla, they leaped aboard the Trump Train.
Trump was Palin on steroids: A buffoon, but a malevolent churl as well.
@MBunge: So your analysis is that 60 million + people who were unhappy with the status quo (a reasonable position in and of itself) voted for the candidate who was clearly going to do everything in his power to make things worse, when he could be bothered to turn the TV off and do anything at all. Despite his lies he made no genuine effort to hide this outcome. And it is up to the majority who did not vote for this imbecile to change their ways so the petulant minority doesn’t vote for him (or someone worse) again out of pure spite?
@Pete S: Don’t really know what Bunge was meaning–I only noted that “well, you still probably won’t…” part represented enlightenment he’s not shown before–but the majority probably can’t control what the petulant minority votes for (the parties might be able to, however). What the majority has to do is circle the wagons better so that it can get the 60-some thousand votes that made the difference cast in its favor.
How it’s likely to do that with the bench of non-Trumps passing on running while the Trump-esques are already sharpening their knives for 2020 is beyond me, but 4 years is a long time. We’ll see.
@Franklin:
Without a doubt. It was described from the start as a high-risk, high-reward proposition. But it needs to be understood what came out later, which is that Schmidt and others in the campaign knew Palin was probably unready to assume the presidency on Jan. 20 in the event that she might have to. They felt they could eventually teach her the ropes, and they didn’t realize just how unready she was when they first selected her, but they knew from the start she probably didn’t have what it took. So they weren’t simply taking a political risk, they were putting the entire country on the line. That was tremendously irresponsible. Schmidt has admitted it was a mistake; McCain has yet to do so.
@Kylopod:
The same Steve Schmidt who predicted.
Now Trump proves that anyone[any Idiot] can “assume the presidency”.
But keep licking Schmidt’s taint.
Mccain is just bitter than Trump won dishonorably by attacking his opponent directly.
@Kylopod:
It’s probably too much to expect that McCain will ever acknowledge that the selection of Palin was a tremendous mistake. For one thing, it would force him to admit, publicly, his own poor judgment; for another, he’d be conceding that he was desperate at the time.
Oh really? McCain has every right to be bitter towards Trump…while McCain was being tortured by the Vietnamese, Trump was using his multiple deferments (for f@cking bone spurs!!!) to avoid even having to serve his country…
@An Interested Party:
McCain was not drafted and is more bitter towards Trump than Bush/Cheney who also avoided Vietnam service.
@Paul L.: Presumably you would be more bitter too if you were tortured in a POW camp and someone said about you, “I like people who weren’t captured” but, perhaps, your devotion to the president is such that you can’t even understand that…
@Paul L.:
How does attacking Schmidt for making an irresponsible decision but giving him credit for owning up to it constitute “licking Schmidt’s taint”? (Classy as always, huh?) And as long as you’re on your “anyone who made a single faulty electoral prediction should be permanently discredited from being taken seriously about anything, ever” kick, let’s see what happens if we follow that logic, shall we?
“And I think that I will win the African American vote and I think I will win the Hispanic vote.” — Donald Trump, Aug. 2, 2015
“And one of the hosts said, if he ever gets 25 percent, this election’s over. You might as well not run it. I’m going to do great with the African Americans.” — Donald Trump, Feb. 21, 2016
“I think we can win the state of California and win it pretty substantially. Now, I’ve been told by all these geniuses, all these brilliant guys — they all say you can’t win the state of California. I think we can.” — Donald Trump, Jun. 2, 2016
“I think we will win New York. I really do.” — Donald Trump, Apr. 28, 2016
“We’re going to make them Republican states. Connecticut is one of them.” — Donald Trump, Jun. 8, 2016
“We are going to win Illinois.” — Donald Trump, May 19, 2016
@Paul L.:
Trump lost by some 3,000,000 votes.
He got into the White House by a math fluke, and with the help of Putin and Comey.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
So In Football it is not who scores the most points wins the game. But the team that runs the most yards wins the game.
@Kylopod:
I should have say “keep licking the Kool-Aid off of Schmidt’s taint.”
Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace just parrot whatever narrative their paymasters at MSDNC want.
@Paul L.:
I’m not surprised you cannot make a proper analogy; understanding relationships takes an IQ.
Think “Inflategate”. The Pats cheated…but still won.
Trump essentially cheated, as he was aided by Putin.
You, and scum like you, believe it’s fine that Russians invaded us.
You Patriot, you….
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
Just waiting for proof of Trump cheating.
$100,000 of Facebook/Google Ads vs. 2 billion election spending + 2 billion of “dark money.” (4000x)
Maybe Robert Mueller will uncover the truth.
Or the True Trump dosser will get leaked.
@Paul L.:
Lacking a 3 digit IQ, you fail reading comprehension.
I said Draft Dodging Donnie was aided by Putin.
As for proof of that; you’ve seen it but refuse to believe it because you are so deep up the Comb-Overs arse. It’s pathetic what a toady you are.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/intelligence-director-says-agencies-agree-russian-meddling-n785481
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/us/politics/senate-intelligence-committee-russia-election-trump.html
As for the mountains of circumstantial evidence that Don-the-Con colluded with Russia…if the 1/4 of the equivalent proof existed about the Clinton’s or Obama you would be screaming for their heads.
I won’t even go into the slam-dunk obstruction case; a 1st year law student could put President Bone Spurs in jail over that.
You are nothing but a sad little boot-licking lacky.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
What does that have to do with Russian collusion?
Same can be said about Dick Cheney/G W Bush. Did they collude with Russia?
So the same people (IC/U.S. intelligence agencies) who lied about spying on Americans are completely trustworthy about Russian collusion?
@Paul L.:
There are so many things wrong with your response; you should go back, yourself, and re-do it. Then get back to us.
Toady…
If my statements were so easily debunked, you should debunk being a draft dodger/getting deferments does not mean you are in league with Putin.
Even by just screaming “non sequitur”
Obot…