Trump diminished in contrast to McCain
Arizona senator’s vision of America is ‘generous and welcoming and bold’
Is it possible that the penny is about to drop for a chunk of that stubborn, perplexing 40-plus per cent of Americans who remain stuck on Donald Trump like the nonhuman hue he gets from his tanning product?
Some recent polls have his popularity slipping from the consistent mark he’s maintained while lying with fully-automatic frequency – the Washington Post counted 4,229 lies in his first 558 days in office to Aug. 1 – through his overt racism; his obsequious subservience to Vladimir Putin, and his transparent efforts to derail or discredit investigations that are leading inexorably into his parlour.
An ABC-Washington Post poll found that two-thirds of Americans want Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the president’s links with Russia to proceed to its ultimate conclusion.
Twenty-nine per cent want Mueller stopped. That is the unshakable Trump base, the folks Hillary Clinton correctly – if unwisely – threw into a basket she called deplorable, the Americans who are refreshed by Trump’s noxious Kool-Aid.
The other 10 to 15 per cent – those Americans who remain in Trump’s fetid fold, yet want Mueller to do his job – can be shaken loose from the president, because those people understand, on some level, that loyalty to a leader cannot transcend allegiance to the rule of law if a free and democratic state is to survive.
If and when they abandon Trump, he becomes another sorry chapter in America’s dichotomous story of virtue and vice.
That dichotomy, and Donald Trump’s immovable place on the ignoble side, was laid before Americans on the weekend in eulogies for the late Arizona Senator John McCain.
The President of the United States was uninvited and absent from the gathering of America’s public leaders – past and present – gathered in Washington Saturday to say goodbye to McCain.
Even while he was playing golf in Virginia, Trump was diminished by comparison to the character of McCain, who died last week of brain cancer.
Trump’s name never came up, nor did it need to when his predecessor, Barak Obama said that so much of America’s political discourse has become “small and mean and petty. Trafficking in bombastic, manufactured outrage. It’s politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but in fact is born of fear.”
Obama said McCain called on Americans to be bigger than that.
Nor was the absent target obscure when Obama said that McCain understood that “if we get in the habit of bending the truth to suit political expediency or party orthodoxy, our democracy will not work.”
Nor, when he noted that McCain, who Obama defeated for the presidency in 2008, “championed a free and independent press as vital to our democratic debate,” was it necessary for the 44th president to remind Americans that the 45th refers to that same press as “the enemy of the people.”
McCain’s daughter Meghan was even more direct in her opprobrium for Trump, who she would number among those Americans that resented McCain for revealing the truth of their character.
“The America of John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold. She’s resourceful, confident, secure. She meets her responsibilities. She speaks quietly because she’s strong. America does not boast because she has no need to. The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”
The contrast with Trump was obvious even before she made it unavoidable by invoking his ubiquitous political slogan ‘Make America Great, Again.’ Her direct attack on Trump initially drew a smattering of applause, that became ominous for the president as it grew and engulfed National Cathedral.
George W. Bush, who defeated McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, contributed to the anti-Trump subtext when he said that “above all, John (McCain) detested the abuse of power. He could not abide bigots and swaggering despots.”
McCain’s national funeral was, according to USA Today, the senator’s final and defiant rebuke to the man who wasn’t there, whose name was never uttered, Donald Trump.
McCain’s public life straddled the two sides of the American dichotomy, but when it really mattered he could be counted on to find his way to the virtue of enduring American principles. Much of America has always shared that characteristic. If it still does, Trump is in trouble.