What McCain incident tells us

The Washington Post

When the U.S. Navy feels obligated to hide a destroyer because its name might irritate the president, said Helaine Olen, it reveals “what a dangerous spot our nation is in.” Last week it was revealed that White House staff pressured Navy officials to keep the USS John S. McCain out of President Trump’s sight line while he was making a Memorial Day speech in Japan. A tarp was temporarily placed over the ship’s name, and its sailors—whose uniforms carried the verboten name—were not invited to hear Trump’s speech. Trump, of course, is “a notoriously thin-skinned man” with no grace or humility who despised the late Sen. McCain for many reasons. McCain refused to abandon his principles to slavishly support Trump, and his war-hero status was “a living, breathing rebuke” of the “faux patriotism” of a playboy heir who dodged the Vietnam draft with phony “bone spurs.” That’s why the White House feared that Trump might have “a presidential temper tantrum” if he even glimpsed McCain’s name on a ship on Memorial Day. Our democracy is in deep trouble when even the military feels obligated to bow before “the moods and whims of a small, petty, and greedy man at the top.”