A day of golf, sour tweets for the president.
President’s screeds against NAFTA, conspiracy come as others rebuke him during senator’s funeral
“The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.” Sen. John McCain’s daughter, Meghan
“So much of our politics … can seem small and mean and petty. … It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born in fear.” Former President Barack Obama
“John’s voice will always come as a whisper over our shoulder, ‘We are better than this; America is better than this.’ ” Former President George W. Bush
For the clusters of onlookers, besuited power players and three former presidents who had all traveled to Washington National Cathedral, the muggy day was a historic opportunity to memorialize the life of Sen. John McCain, who was remembered as a deeply patriotic war hero, a former Republican presidential candidate and a scrappy, humanly flawed, ultimately idealistic lawmaker.
For President Donald Trump, Saturday.
In the many discussions about how to mark his life that McCain had with his staff and family before he died, he had made clear he did not want Trump to participate in anything they planned. So as McCain was eulogized in the presence of much of the U.S. political establishment, Trump, pointedly uninvited, engaged in what by now is a familiar weekend routine. He sent a series of angry tweets aimed at some political adversaries, then left the White House to play a round of golf at his resort in Virginia.
“This is the scandal here — a police state,” the president wrote, quoting a conservative commentator about a purported conspiracy to spy on Trump, as McCain’s coffin was carried into the cathedral.
He dredged up the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia and complained about it. In a series of tweets, he argued that “the DOJ and FBI are completely out to lunch.”
While McCain’s closest friends insisted the senator did not harbor a personal grudge toward the president, Trump’s opinion of McCain has been more explicit. In recent months, as McCain was dying of cancer, the president’s references often were barbed, and at his political rallies he would mimic the thumbs-down signal the senator had made when he voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act.
When he recently signed a defense bill named in the senator’s honor, the president refused to utter his name. Nor did Trump join leaders from both parties in sending sympathy to McCain and his family after it was announced Aug. 24 that he was stopping treatment for his cancer. He died a day later.
But while he was urged by his aides to behave in a more unifying manner after the White House was criticized for initially flying the U.S. flag only briefly at half-staff in McCain’s honor, the president made it clear Saturday that he had no intention of letting his former adversary — whose carefully stage-managed plans played out as his own subtle rebuke of the president — have all the attention.
Instead, upstaged by a senator whose final acts were defined by his calls for bipartisan unity amid a climate of coarsening politics, Trump stayed in Washington and spent the first day of a holiday weekend saying and doing what he usually does.
Not all the members of the Trump administration followed his lead. Earlier in the morning, as Cindy McCain, John McCain’s widow, stood in front of a wreath honoring her husband at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis somberly stood by her side.
Most notably, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, along with John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, entered the cathedral just as the hearse carrying McCain arrived.
Trump continued to tweet during the service, switching his focus to Canada and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump said that he would be happy to just terminate NAFTA altogether. It remains a matter of debate as to whether Trump has the authority to do that on his own.
“If we don’t make a fair deal for the U.S. after decades of abuse, Canada will be out,” Trump wrote. “Congress should not interfere w/ these negotiations or I will simply terminate NAFTA entirely & we will be far better off.”
As the president tweeted, onlookers outside the cathedral lined up along the streets, and pointed through the wroughtiron fences. And several took note of a difference they saw between Trump’s unpredictable approach to politics and the senator who stayed steadfast to his ideals.
“He’s almost a thing of the past,” said Boyd Lewis, 61, a Democrat from Washington. “Today, the lack of civility, lack of integrity coming out of the White House — McCain was a great soul, not a baseless demigod.”
Inside the cathedral, it was Meghan McCain, the senator’s daughter, who made the contrast most explicit, delivering a pointed condemnation of Trump’s policies, seizing on his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” in her emotional eulogy.
“The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again,” McCain said as applause rang out in the cathedral, “because America was always great.”