McCain’s deepest idealism, which he reserves for nato and the defense of the West, is not much shared in the Republican Party now, subsumed as it is by Trump and nationalist retrenchment.
.. the homage has been so personal that it has obscured the political matters of why the President continues to make an enemy of him, and of what conservatism will lose when McCain is gone.
.. “I’ve worked for him for thirty years, I’ve listened to him so much. I can impersonate the guy,” Salter said. “In terms of pop-culture sensibility, it’s more Rat Pack—kind of smart-ass, a little bit of a wiseguy. But he can also be quite sentimental. He’s like a romantic cynic. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s not. It comes out of this grand-gesture sensibility.”
.. He’s seen the very worst that humanity can produce and he expects it at any moment. And it gives him a sensibility—that’s why he can identify with these hopeless causes in Belorussia or wherever. He knows how to hold on to hope when it’s for suckers.”
.. I asked what, for McCain, had been the worst moment of Trump’s ascendance. “The Khans,” Salter said.
.. the event that stuck with him most, Salter said, was a reënlistment and naturalization ceremony that David Petraeus held in Iraq on the Fourth of July, in 2007, for soldiers who had yet to become citizens. “And there were two pairs of boots on two chairs,” Salter said. “Two guys who were about to become citizens but they were killed that week. And he’s told me that story a hundred times and he cries every time he tells that story. Petraeus had some line—‘They died for their country before it was their country.’ It was like a gut punch to him. That’s who the Khans’ son was to him.”
.. McCain spent the months after Trump’s Inauguration on an international reassurance tour, telling overseas allies the story that some Republicans in Washington were telling themselves—that Trump’s authoritarianism would be constrained by those around him, that this was a phase that would pass. “He has a lot of faith in Mattis,”
.. McCain, without naming the President, delivered a broadside against Putin, Trump, and the national retrenchments across the West that struck some valedictory notes. “I refuse to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries,” McCain said. “I am a proud, unapologetic believer in the West, and I believe we must always, always stand up for it.”
.. “That speech was really, ‘Hey, this thing we’ve done together is the greatest thing an alliance of nations has ever done in history. Be proud of it. It’s worth preserving. Don’t give up on us.’ ” Of course the nativism he so despised had taken hold of his own political party, and his choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential nominee marked an obvious pivot toward Trumpism.
.. It fell to Salter and Rick Davis, another longtime aide, to inform McCain: “We told him, ‘If you get the flu, you’re not going to survive it, John.’ ”
.. By the late nineties, journalists had the outline of the character: the war hero possessed by regrets. “One of the traits McCain’s staff finds most maddening in their boss is his tendency to recall for journalists only his most damning moments,” Michael Lewis wrote, in 1997. “Ask him about Vietnam and he’ll tell you about the time he stole a washrag from the guy in the adjoining cell. Ask him about his first marriage and he’ll leap right to his adultery.”
.. Conservatives could celebrate the extremity of McCain’s patriotism, and liberals could detect a recognition that war breaks men.
.. McCain’s story was one small way that Americans reconciled themselves to the waste and failure of Vietnam, and it was this reconciliation that Trump went after when he said his own war heroes were the men who hadn’t been captured. Trump imagines war without suffering, which leaves no room for McCain.
.. The closest thing that McCain has to an heir is the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, who is a former military lawyer and shares McCain’s faith in American power, but who is also a more conventional partisan figure and has at times sided with Trump (including, most recently, about his decision to revoke the security clearance of former C.I.A. director John Brennan).
.. “Lindsey really believes,” Salter said. “But he always makes a joke of it—‘We’ve got to get out of here, they’re going to kill us.’ ”
I said, trying to get the contrast between McCain and Graham right, “So McCain’s the more—”
Salter cut me off. He said, “The more romantic.”
Trump vs. the Khans
By Trump’s account, he conceded the good sense of this, although he noted how he always prefers hitting back — “it makes me feel good.”
.. By Trump’s account, he conceded the good sense of this, although he noted how he always prefers hitting back — “it makes me feel good.”
.. The Trump response predictably fueled an all-out media blitz by the Khans. It validated one of the main lines of criticism of Trump at the DNC — that he is so thin-skinned, he can’t be entrusted with the awesome powers of the presidency. And his religiously fraught slap at Khan’s wife and his rhetorical manhandling of a family who had sacrificed so much for the country reinforced the sense that he refuses to honor basic political norms.
.. It’s not that grief validates a particular point of view, or someone who has suffered a terrible loss should be above criticism. But the grieving mother or father deserves an extra measure of respect. This isn’t just Politics 101, but Decency 101.
.. Trump believes, from his decades in the public eye in the media capital of the world, that it always pays to be on the attack. This isn’t true anymore. The question no longer is whether he can garner headlines, but whether he can demonstrate his suitability to becoming commander-in-chief. The only one he’s hurt by his assault on the Khans is himself.
Trump tests his limits
But this protracted battle, now entering a fourth day, is testing the limits of his bullying, no-apologies political approach in a way no other self-inflicted wound or crisis has.
.. “I understand they challenged him, but there’s some things you just can’t win and you shouldn’t engage in. [Trump] wanted to change the subject to radical Islamic terrorism — which is what this guy died fighting. He just can’t win the argument and needs to shut up about it, but his personality won’t allow him to do that.
.. Over the weekend, longtime Trump ally Roger Stone suggested that a link between the Khans and the Muslim Brotherhood. (In a later Tweet, Stone issued a “correction” to instead accused Khizr Khan of being linked to a Saudi financier of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.)
.. But by doing this, he’s really hurting himself in his efforts to woo undecided voters.”
.. Trump’s chorus of prominent Republican critics includes few leaders who are ready to rescind their endorsements of him altogether. And they may hold firm until Trump begins to hurt their own reelection chances or standing with constituents.
.. “But if they flat-out reject him, they risk alienating a significant portion of their base.”
.. His pivot, however, was not to attacking Clinton, but rather to a lengthy riff in which he bragged about winning the GOP primary, slammed CNN and spoke angrily about his supposed mistreatment by the media.
He also suggested, for the first time, that November’s election will be “rigged” against him.
‘He Doesn’t Know What the Word Sacrifice Means’
Donald Trump has asked why I did not speak at the Democratic convention. He said he would like to hear from me. Here is my answer to Donald Trump: Because without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart.
As Philip Rucker summed it up, with less than 99 days until the election, the Republican nominee is debating with the parents of a slain American serviceman over whether he has sacrificed as much they have. David Simon, creator of The Wire, added, “If I scripted this, it would critiqued harshly and correctly as West Wing-era liberal wish-fulfillment.” But over the last 14 months, Trump has repeatedly done things that made liberals rub their hands in glee—only to see him escape unscathed.
.. In late 1953, Senator Joe McCarthy turned his red-baiting crusade toward the Army, accusing it of being stocked with Communists. McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had miscalculated, and the reaction doomed McCarthy’s crusade and career. Decades later, Cohn became a close friend of a young real-estate developer named Donald Trump. If Cohn’s protégé learned anything about from him about why it’s unwise for a politician to go to war with the U.S. Army, it isn’t showing today.