Anne McElvoy: One last swipe at Trump was just typical of the John McCain I met

Last word: John McCain took aim at Donald Trump with his final statement, delivered after his death on Saturday
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Deaths in politics can have as much impact as decisions taken in a lifetime. Senator John McCain, suffering from an aggressive brain tumour, anticipated his own end. After a long-running feud with Donald Trump, he ensured the last word was his. The address he wrote to be delivered post-humously was a rallying cry to American greatness and a pointed attack on an administration “hiding behind walls”. The White House’s erratic down, up and down again flag-flying in his honour since the weekend demonstrates the late senator’s uncanny ability to irk the President.

I met him on a few occasions, the first time covering the 2008 White House race for this paper. He was a fierce upholder of bi-partisanship — if selective in what he agreed to be co-operative about. Over the years he reached across the aisle on climate change, immigration and party finance, while adhering to his patriotic, small-government roots. Just as keenly as he enjoyed unanimity in a good cause, he relished a worthwhile foe.

The sitting President will therefore be one of the few senior Democrats and Republicans not at his funeral service. Eulogies are planned by Barack Obama and George W Bush — a restatement of McCain’s broad base of admirers (though he had run against both for office). But the Trump-McCain stand-off, which culminated in the gimcrack jibe at McCain’s imprisonment by the Viet Cong: “I like heroes that weren’t captured”, was not just The Donald at his most grimly asinine. It stemmed from resentment at the kind of respect McCain had earned for his bravery.

My esteem for McCain and one of the reasons he attracted admirers stemmed from another major conflict and its aftermath. When the Iraq war’s goals proved elusive and disappointments led to disillusion about liberal interventionism, it was so easy to slip into one of two default modes of thinking about American-led endeavours. First, that it was inevitably doomed and the world would be better off without it. Second, that in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks pretty much any form of behaviour inspired by the immediate interests of the US was acceptable.

McCain unfashionably resisted the glib temptation to call-the-whole-thing-off on interventions, stubbornly advocating the use of “hard power” in Syria and support for Ukraine. He viscerally distrusted the preaching of “soft power” if it left less scrupulous leaders to make the running. One of his fiercest denunciations of Trump was for toadying to a “tyrant” in the Kremlin.

He believed in the projection of American force “without sending the marines to every brushfire”. Yet he was equally forthright in making cases that were inconvenient to many of his domestic allies on the Right. Where many US hawks were over-keen to excuse human rights abuses in the early chaotic years of the “war on terror”, McCain warned that it would bring the US into moral dispute — and he was right. Britain’s own intelligence agencies have recently been forced to revisit operations to address complaints that they were complicit in the maltreatment of detainees.

Today this all sounds blindingly obvious. But McCain made his argument at a moment of great self-doubt in the US and when it was hard to be both a defence hawk and an opponent of torture with equal vigour. He is frequently described as a “maverick”. In which case, we need more mavericks: capable of coming to their own conclusions and challenging friends and foes. His final act — voting against a key Trump measure to repeal Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act — was craftily planned to strike a blow where he knew it would damage the President’s legislative programme most.

"In his final message, Trump is reduced to the status of  ‘present difficulties’ to be endured and overcome" 

None of this made him flawless. He could be testy and short-termist and his run against Obama in the 2008 White House race seemed absurdly cavalier in its lack of response to the financial crisis. The mésalliance with Sarah Palin was so obviously a compromise cobbled together to lure the Tea Party vote to his side.

Because he had too little time for the detail of the fray there were sometimes comedies of errors along the way. The finest was surely memorable — he proved unable to remember how many houses he owned (around seven it turned out). McCain was a wealthy man, with no shortage of adoring acolytes and the vanity to enjoy it. But he was also fundamentally serious about America’s mission in the world and he died urging his country to re-embrace it.

My last encounter with McCain happened just over a year ago, shortly before his cancer was diagnosed. In our interview he ranged from cheerfully courteous to outright irritation if he did not want to answer a question. He was clearly in the process of moving from chiding Trump to more forthright opposition, which he found hard as a lifelong Republican. But “anger and bitterness” were proliferating under the President and America’s “shining city on the hill” was allowing its values to dim.

By the end, he had given up hope that Trump could be changed or his impact diluted. But he did believe that people of good faith putting aside differences could start to build alternatives to the bleak offer of a walled-off America.

In his final message, Trump is reduced to the status of “present difficulties” to be endured and overcome. Blessings are duly invited on America and its ability to conqer adversity. The way to annoy a puny incumbent, he knew full well, was to deliver an uplifting, stubborn quasi-presidential address from beyond the grave. And he did just that.

  • Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist

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