It got off to a bad start, and President Trump’s venomous relationship with Sen. John McCain probably won’t end well either.
The president was reportedly disinvited to McCain’s funeral months ago,
after McCain’s battle with brain cancer took a turn for the worse, and
now the veteran Arizona Republican senator has decided to discontinue
medical treatment.
Throughout McCain’s illness, Trump has continued to publicly snub him — including a recent appearance in which the president declined to say McCain’s name when signing a bill that was named for him. As of late Friday, Trump had said nothing about McCain’s medical decision.
Trump does not want to comment on McCain before he dies, White House
officials said, and there was no effort to publish a statement Friday as
many politicians released supportive comments on the ailing senator.
Their increasingly combative relationship has served as a metaphor of
sorts for the Republican Party: the former Vietnam POW and “proud
conservative” who fell short to Barack Obama in his run for president in
2008 versus the loud draft avoider who rapidly seized control of the
GOP and White House eight years later.
McCain rarely disguised his distaste for Trump as the real estate
developer ran for president on a platform that included attacks on
immigrants and U.S. allies. In July 2015, after then-candidate
Trump rallied an estimated 15,000 in Phoenix and claimed to represent a
“silent majority,” McCain said Trump had “fired up the crazies” in his
state. The battle was on.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and
President Trump have been at odds with each other for a while. Here's a
look at their war of words.(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
By the end of that month, Trump had disparaged McCain’s Vietnam War
service, saying McCain was “not a war hero” despite spending more than
five years as a POW and enduring torture.
“He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said during a forum in Ames, Iowa.
Trump refused to apologize at the time, despite criticism from nearly
every corner, and has never retracted the statement. He has occasionally
told people that he does not regret the comment.
“The reality is that John McCain the politician has made America less
safe, sent our brave soldiers into wrongheaded foreign adventures,
covered up for President Obama with the VA scandal and has spent most of
his time in the Senate pushing amnesty,” Trump wrote in an op-ed for
USA Today that month. “He would rather protect the Iraqi border than
Arizona’s.”
Left: An injured John McCain is seen in North Vietnam. Right: Donald Trump in 1976. (AP; The Washington Post)
McCain
did eventually endorse Trump in 2016, then withdrew his support weeks
before the election after release of an “Access Hollywood” tape where
Trump is recorded bragging about groping women.
Trump’s immediate and angry response: “The very foul mouthed Sen. John
McCain begged for my support during his primary (I gave, he won), then
dropped me over locker room remarks!”
In office, McCain has supported much of Trump’s economic and national
security agenda, despite his misgivings about Trump’s dismissive
approach to traditional U.S. alliances. But he has also shown
frustration toward Trump’s White House, dismissing nominees abruptly
from his office or growing angry at senior West Wing aides.
McCain crossed the White House last year over the GOP attempt to repeal
Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and Trump has never forgiven him. After the
vote, Trump said that McCain voted no out of a personal vendetta
against him and that he would never vote yes to something that helped
Trump.
He repeatedly told advisers that McCain should step down from the seat
and let the Republican governor appoint another senator. Trump has also
told White House aides that his supporters are not big fans of McCain
and boasted that he became president while McCain did not.
Trump’s retelling of the health-care vote, usually without mentioning
McCain by name, has continued throughout the senator’s more than
year-long treatment for brain cancer. The 81-year-old’s family said
Friday that he is discontinuing treatment.
“Obamacare, we got rid of the individual mandate, which is the most
unpopular aspect,” Trump said during a political speech Aug. 13 in
Utica, N.Y. “I would have gotten rid of everything, but as you know one
of our, one of our wonderful senators said, ‘thumbs down,’ at 2 o’clock
in the morning.”
Trump’s aggrieved references to the health-care vote “never stops being
gross,” McCain’s daughter Meghan wrote on Twitter in June.
“I’ve let him know several times that was beneath the office and it
doesn’t reflect well on him,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, a South Carolina
Republican and longtime McCain friend, said of Trump’s attacks. “He’s an
American hero by any stretch of the imagination, and I don’t see how it
helps the president.”
Graham said Trump “feels like he helped McCain in his primary, and John is sort of picking on him.”
In May, Trump and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to
apologize for an aide’s remark that McCain’s opposition to Gina Haspel,
nominee for CIA director, “doesn’t matter” because “he’s dying anyway.”
The aide, Kelly Sadler, left her job the next month but White House
aides said her departure was not a punishment for the remark. Trump told
advisers he did not care if she apologized or not and was more
determined to suss out who leaked the comments, calling advisers in for a
West Wing scolding.
During occasional Oval Office conversations about McCain’s health or
status in the Senate, Trump would usually say nothing, current and
former officials said. He grew angry regularly that McCain was portrayed
as the “good guy” in the news media and he as the “bad guy,” according
to a former senior administration official who spoke to Trump about
McCain.
Trump has fumed to friends about McCain’s role in receiving research
compiled by a former British intelligence officer that alleged Russia
had potentially compromising information about Trump. He has complained
that McCain has criticized him over Russia and foreign policy,
questioning his expertise and noting that he won the presidency and
McCain did not.
“Even a remote risk that the President of the United States might be
vulnerable to Russian extortion had to be investigated,” McCain wrote in
what he called his last book, “The Restless Wave,” published this year.
“I could not independently verify any of it, and so I did what any
American who cares about our nation’s security should have done. I put
the dossier in my office safe, called the office of the director of the
FBI, Jim Comey, and asked for a meeting,” McCain wrote.
McCain’s assessments became more withering the longer Trump was in office.
In August 2017, McCain denounced white supremacists who held a deadly
rally in Charlottesville after Trump had said the event was attended by
“fine people on both sides.”
“White supremacists aren’t patriots, they’re traitors — Americans must
unite against hatred & bigotry,” McCain tweeted at the time.
In accepting the Freedom Medal at the National Constitutional Center in
October, McCain condemned “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by
people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems,” a clear
dig at Trump.
Asked about McCain’s remarks the following day, Trump said “people have to be careful, because at some point I fight back.”
“You know, I’m being very nice, I’m being very, very nice, but at some
point I fight back and it won’t be pretty,” Trump said in a WMAL
interview.
Not long afterward, McCain appeared to take a shot at Trump for avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War.
“One aspect of the [Vietnam] conflict by the way that I will never ever
countenance is that we drafted the lowest income level of America and
the highest income level found a doctor that would say that they had a
bone spur,” McCain said during an interview with CSPAN.
McCain did not mention Trump by name, but his meaning appeared clear.
Trump received five wartime deferments, including one in which a doctor
diagnosed him with bone spurs.
Finally in July, McCain pilloried Trump for his chummy performance
alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at a news conference in
Helsinki, calling it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an
American president in memory.”
The U.S. president had rhetorically embraced Putin and appeared to side
with him over U.S. intelligence officials on Moscow’s aggressive
election interference.
“The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naivete, egotism, false
equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate,”
McCain said. “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly
before a tyrant.”
Trump said nothing in response. As McCain spends his final days in
Arizona, aides say, Trump is inclined to still say nothing at all.
