All over the country, flags are flying at a respectful half-mast after the death of U.S. Sen. John McCain. As custom dictates, the flags will remain at half mast until Sunday, when McCain is buried at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.
There is, however, a notable exception. At the White House Monday morning, the flag was flying at full mast. At the personal order of Donald Trump, the White House has also issued no official statement celebrating McCain’s decades of service, heroism and sacrifice to his country, to our country. Trump himself sent a curt tweet Saturday night, expressing respect for McCain’s family, but notably none for McCain himself.
(UPDATE at 3:45 p.m.: After harsh, bipartisan criticism, the Trump White House surrendered to basic decency and brought the flag to half-staff.)
Because as we know, the president does not believe McCain worthy of such honors:
The meanness, the small pettiness of that statement continues to confound me even now. It is devoid of human decency, particularly given the fact that while McCain was being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison, refusing to buckle, Trump was in the nightclubs of Manhattan, ducking service on the basis of mysterious bone spurs.
And on Saturday night, as word of McCain’s passing had begun to spread across the country, Trump was on Twitter celebrating the one man whom he does consider a hero:
There are a couple of points to make about that tweet. The first is its factual accuracy, or lack thereof. No poll gives Trump a 52 percent approval rating or anything close to it. His apparent inspiration for the tweet was a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Saturday night that put his job-approval number at 44 percent, with 52 percent disapproval. Trump’s instinctive ability to recast reality to his liking could not be more evident.
Note also the personal neediness reflected in that tweet. I have never encountered an adult human being more desperate for approval and adulation than Trump, nor anybody less deserving of it. The contrast with McCain on those counts could not be more stark.
Don’t get me wrong: McCain had his faults. His support for the invasion of Iraq helped to drive us into the biggest foreign-policy blunder in American history, and his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate would have been an equally egregious mistake had he and Palin won the 2008 presidential race.
However, McCain placed adherence to fact and principle above loyalty to tribe, to the conformity of thought that the tribe demanded. It was not in him to pretend to believe the unbelievable, to accept the unacceptable. Out of basic self-respect, he could not and would not succumb to the hive mind, and those who have made that surrender themselves have long despised him for highlighting their own weakness with his strength.
And whatever else you might say about him, McCain had the character to point out that no, the emperor standing before us had no clothes, that in fact the man was stark raving naked, with every shortcoming revealed.
At 81, McCain lived a full life, but if there is tragedy in his passing it is a tragedy of timing. He has always expressed confidence in his country, bolstered by a firm belief that in the end his fellow Americans will do the right thing. This time, however, fate has dictated that he leave us in mid-story, having witnessed the rise of Trumpism but not its repudiation, and for that I grieve for him.
McCain was, for example, a strong advocate of America’s international leadership. Presidents came and went, but in his 30 years in the U.S. Senate, McCain was a constant presence in foreign capitals, strengthening the ties of alliance. Thanks in large part to Trump, that American-made international order is now being undermined from within. Those allies have lost faith, for understandable reasons, as French President Emmanuel Macron underlined just this morning.
McCain’s father and grandfather -- both admirals in the U.S. Navy -- are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but McCain has requested that he be buried at Annapolis because of his great affinity for the place. Less than a year ago, in fact, McCain returned to the Naval Academy to speak to the midshipmen and remind them of their duty.
“We are asleep to the necessity of our leadership, and to the opportunities and real dangers of this world,” McCain warned. “We are asleep in our echo chambers, where our views are always affirmed and information that contradicts them is always fake. We are asleep in our polarized politics, which exaggerates our differences, looks for scapegoats instead of answers, and insists we get all our way all the time from a system of government based on compromise, principled cooperation and restraint.”
“It’s time to wake up,” he told them, and through them told us.
“The associations, rules, values and aspirations that comprise the international order we have superintended for three-quarters of a century are under gathering attack from regimes that desire a world less just and less free and more corrupt,” he told his audience, warning that those outside forces are in collusion with “forces within liberal democracies themselves, parties that preach resentful nationalism rather than enlightened self-interest, nativism rather than equal justice.”
“We have to fight. We have to fight against propaganda and crackpot conspiracy theories. We have to fight isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. We have to defeat those who would worsen our divisions. We have to remind our sons and daughters that we became the most powerful nation on earth by tearing down walls, not building them.”
Rest in peace, senator. We’ve got this.
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