Message to Trump in tributes to McCain
John McCain’s daughter said her father embodied ‘‘American greatness’’ as she used his funeral to dismiss ‘‘cheap rhetoric’’ in a pointed rebuke of Donald Trump.
As the president wound down with a round of golf after a week dominated by the death of one of his most prominent Republican critics, Meghan McCain was applauded by former presidents in a moving eulogy.
Speaking at times through tears about her father, the former Arizona senator and presidential candidate, at the Washington National Cathedral, she said: ‘‘The America of John McCain has no reason to be great again because America was always great.’’
Meghan McCain, whose father proved to be the antidote to a divided Washington in his final years, did not mention Trump by name but it was clear her comments, greeted by applause, were directed at the Oval Office.
Elsewhere during the two-and-a-half hour service the president, who was not invited, and his approach to politics appeared to be critiqued by Barack Obama among others.
One of three former presidents in attendance, he warned of how modern politics was dominated by ‘‘bombast and insult and phoney controversies’’ before urging Americans to live by McCain’s principles of patriotism.
George W Bush, the former Republican president who also gave a eulogy, said McCain recognised ‘‘his opponents were still patriots and human beings’’, while Henry Kissinger, the 95-year-old former secretary of state, praised the former senator’s warning against America’s ‘‘withdrawal from the world’’.
Trump, who clashed frequently with McCain in recent years despite both men being from the same party, spent the morning issuing familiar political attacks on Twitter.
As the body of McCain was being carried through Washington DC in a coffin draped in the American flag, Trump was posting criticism of his own law officials.
Around half-an-hour into the service, broadcast live on cable news channels, the president left the White House in a ‘‘Make America Great Again’’ hat and short-sleeved shirt, heading for one of his golf clubs.
The day epitomised a political struggle inside the Republican Party which McCain, a war veteran and sixterm senator, and Trump, a tycoon and reality television star, had come to embody.
At the funeral of McCain, who died aged 81 of brain cancer, were many leading figures of the Washington establishment from both sides of the aisle.
The Obamas and the Bushes were joined by Bill and Hillary Clinton on the front row of the cathedral. Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, the Republican and Democrat leaders in the Senate, sat together in a sign of bipartisanship.
Senior Trump administration figures were also there including Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and her husband Jared Kushner, as well as John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, and James Mattis, the defence secretary. – Telegraph Group