The awful reality that Donald Trump's repeated attacks on John McCain proves
Harlow pushes back on lawmaker regarding Trump's comments(CNN)On July 18, 2015, then-candidate Donald Trump said this about John McCain: "He's not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."
On
March 19, 2019, President Donald Trump offered this assessment of the
late war hero and senator: "I was never a fan of John McCain and I never
will be."
Those two
comments -- almost four years apart and more than six months after
McCain's death -- provide telling bookends to understand just how much
Trump has changed Republican politics (and politics generally), and not
for the better.
When
Trump initially attacked McCain as something less than a war hero in
2015, it was covered as the end of a campaign that never really got
started. Trump has been in the race for all of a month. He was still an
asterisk in most polling. And everyone who knew anything assumed that
attacking McCain's five years spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam -- a
time that left the Arizona Republican with lifelong wounds -- was a
death sentence of Trump's political ambitions.
After
all, while plenty of Republicans didn't agree with McCain's much-touted
renegade nature -- and his willingness to buck party leadership -- no
one ever questioned the man's service to the country (in the military
and in elected office). And doing so was seen as the easiest way to
destroy your political future.
Except
it didn't destroy Trump. For all the hand-wringing and predictions of
doom for his campaign, he just kept right on going -- first to the
Republican presidential nomination and then to the White House. For many
of his supporters, Trump's broadsides against McCain were music to
their ears -- finally someone was standing up to the political
establishment in Washington! Trump wasn't afraid of slaughtering a
sacred cow -- or all the sacred cows! He didn't care! And they loved it.
Which brings me to Tuesday and Trump's comments about McCain, who died in August 2018 after a battle with brain cancer. Here's all of what Trump said:
"I'm
very unhappy that he didn't repeal and replace Obamacare, as you know.
He campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years and then he
got to a vote and he said thumbs down. And our country would've saved a
trillion dollars and we would've had great healthcare.
Those comments come after a weekend in which Trump repeatedly attacked McCain,
who, in case you forgot, is deceased, for graduating "last in his
class" from the Naval Academy and for allegedly sending the so-called
Steele dossier to the media. (Trump offered zero proof that McCain had
leaked the dossier, put together by a former British intelligence agent,
to the press.)
So. Let's take a
step back here and think of what happened here in Washington on Tuesday.
Sitting next to the leader of a foreign country, the President of the
United States went after a former Republican senator (and former GOP
presidential nominee) who not only served in the Vietnam War but spent
years of his life being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison camp. And
this is a President who received several deferments during Vietnam, including for bone spurs. In an interview with The New York Times in 2016, Trump called the condition "temporary" and "minor."
Here's
what I know: These latest comments will cause zero erosion in Trump's
support among his hardcore backers. They will love the wringing of hands
and woe-is-me reaction by who they believe to be elites. "He's freaking them all out! They don't know what to do with him!"
Here's
what I also know: There are certain things that are right and certain
things that are wrong -- whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or
somewhere in between. And attacking a dead man who spent five years as a
prisoner of war and another three decades serving the country in
elected office, is simply wrong. That's true if Barack Obama, George W.
Bush, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce or whoever the next president
will be did it. (None of them would have said what Trump did about a man
with as decorated a past as McCain but the point still holds.
Trump
proudly embraces his smashing of political idols. Desecrating the old
ways of doing things -- and doing so gleefully -- he believes is at the
root of his political people. It says, he thinks, that he won't let the
rules that past crappy politicians have lived by govern him.
But
what Trump's comments about McCain should remind us of is this: Whether
there is political gain to be found in dishonoring a lifelong public
servant, it is simply wrong. It is not who we are -- or who we should
be. That everyone -- Republicans, Democrats, independents and all the
rest -- won't come together to say that as one is profoundly depressing
and disappointing.
