John McCain Appreciation Thread

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.

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 dodger 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Vladi¬mir Putin at a news conference in Helsinki, calling it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”

“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.”

I find it incredulous that military pilots talk about the dangers they face, with little acknowledgement given to the danger they pose to civis