Instead, he’s become a civic freelancer, heading the government but peripheral to the moral function of society. Tragedy strikes and people simultaneously wish the President would make a statement and hope that Donald Trump doesn’t say anything.
Mr. Trump did not say anything about Mr. McCain in his hour-plus Indiana appearance. The rally was standard Trump combo platter, casting Mr. Trump as the president of the people who voted for him, and encouraging them to revel in grievance and animus.
He rehashed his 2016 election win, more than once. He whipped up the crowd against the media, the day the F.B.I. arrested a man for threatening to kill Boston Globe employees, using Mr. Trump’s phrase “enemy of the people.” He said that he was no longer allowed to call Hispanic gang members “animals,” a term he then repeated several times. He invited his crowd to imagine “if Crooked Hillary Clinton had won.”
Mr. McCain’s colleagues remembered a man who was a friend even while they fought. Mr. Trump, still playing his campaign-rally character on TV, promises the joy of savaging your enemies even after they’ve been defeated. His rally crowds (including the one in Indiana) still chant “Lock her up!” nearly two years after Mrs. Clinton’s loss, joined in one case by his attorney general.
This was the bargain the country made electing someone who became a celebrity for saying “You’re fired,” who uses the terms “nice” and “Boy Scout” as insults, who once told People magazine, “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”
John McCain was, per nearly everyone who spoke about him, a battler, too. But he coordinated his last media blitz to say that American leaders should, after and even amid a fight, see their opponents as humans and not simply obstacles to be crushed.
It was his last argument from the grave, but as Mr. Trump has made clear, it is not something we can expect, for the moment anyway, in this life.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/arts/television/john-mccain-service-trump-rally.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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