McCain tributes echo with criticism of Trump
WASHINGTON » John McCain’s daughter and two former presidents led a public rebuke of President Donald Trump’s divisive politics at the late senator’s memorial service Saturday in a call for a return to civility among the nation’s leaders.
The nearly three-hour service at the Washington National Cathedral was a remarkable show of defiance against a president whom McCain openly defied in life as the antithesis of the American spirit of service to something greater than any individual.
Standing near McCain’s flagdraped casket and with Trump’s daughter in the audience, Meghan McCain delivered a broadside against the uninvited president without mentioning his name.
“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness — the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic ap- propriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served,” she said, her voice first choking back tears. Then, it rose in anger.
“The America of John McCain,” she added, with a reference to Trump’s trademark phrase, “has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”
The audience of Washington power players erupted in applause.
Trump has dismissed the idea that McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, was a hero. The president made clear he resented McCain’s thumbs- down vote last year that sank the Republican attempt to repeal national health care. And he marked McCain’s death on Aug. 25 with traditional presidential actions only after he came under fire from the American Legion.
Trump chose to head to his Virginia golf course during Saturday’s service and tweeted his grievances against the FBI and NAFTA throughout the day. In one missive, he misspelled former President Barack Obama’s first name. He sent Ivanka Trump; her husband, Jared Kushner; Defense Secretary James Mattis; and others to the service to represent the administration.
McCain asked Obama, a Democrat, and George W. Bush, a Republican, to speak at his memorial service, and they gave personal testimony that overcoming rivalries and partisan politics was not only possible but good for the country. Both men had denied McCain’s presidential aspirations. But they spoke of reconciling with him during personal moments afterward, and, as Bush said, “the rivalry melted away.”
In separate eulogies, Obama and Bush also delivered pushback to Trump that was more subtle than Meghan McCain’s but unmistakable nonetheless.
Obama spoke of the long talks he and McCain had almost weekly in the Oval Office and the senator’s understanding that America’s security and influence came not from “our ability to bend oth- ers to our will” but universal values of rule of law and human rights.
“So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage,” Obama said in a not-so-veiled nod to Trump. “It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born in fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.”
Bush said one of the great gifts in his life was becoming friends with his former White House rival. He said they would in later years recall their political battles like former football players remembering the big game.
But mostly Bush recalled a champion for the “forgotten people” at home and abroad whose legacy will serve as a reminder, even in times of doubt, of the power of America as more than a physical place but a “carrier of human aspirations.”