Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R) defends Trump’s attacks by claiming his voters see McCain as the “embodiment” of the sort of “lifetime career politician” who left them feeling “powerless and voiceless for many years,” until Trump arrived.
GOP consultant Mike Shields claims Trump’s attacks on McCain tap his voters’ frustration with “politicians that lie to them” and “aren’t real,” whereas these attacks show Trump is “real.” Trump’s outsider authenticity turns out to be a willingness to slime a dead man who can’t defend himself.
.. And in a new interview with Fox News, Trump himself makes similar claims. He rips into McCain as “horrible” for voting against Obamacare repeal, adding: “We would have had great health care.” And he slams McCain for turning over to the FBI the “Steele dossier,” which he claims was “paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.”
Thus, the narrative Trumpworld is spinning is that, in attacking McCain, Trump is standing up for his voters, by going after a symbol of the GOP elites he campaigned against and of the deep-state forces working against the will of those voters, and those who blocked him from delivering on his health-care promises.
.. My intention here is not to defend or exalt McCain, but rather to look at what all this says about what a con this whole presidency really is.
Trump did not merely promise to repeal Obamacare. He also vowed to replace it with “insurance for everybody.” He explicitly campaigned on the idea that his desire to give people health care made him different from GOP elites. But he sold out on this promise, by embracing the actual goal of GOP elites: rolling back Obamacare’s coverage and protections for millions without meaningfully replacing them.
Because this was so unpopular, Republicans employed extraordinary partisan tactics and secrecy to try to push it through. This procedural abuse is what McCain voted against. He blocked Trump’s efforts to conspire with GOP elites to sell out on his promise to his voters.
That’s of a piece with Trump’s broader selling-out of his economic populism. After getting elected by promising to drain the swamp of elite corruption and take on the plutocrats who rig our political economy to enrich themselves, he gave those elites a deregulation spree that further rigged the economy in their favor, and a corporate tax cut that lavished enormous benefits on top earners. (As it happens, this is an area where Trump and McCain broadly agree.)