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Trump never misses a chance to debase himself

I lived and died a proud American.
13341409_web1_Opinion

I lived and died a proud American.

-The late Sen. John McCain, in a poignant farewell message to his country.

The world is full of heroes, many of whom are never known beyond their families, their communities.

John McCain, who was first to admit his own flaws and frailties, was a colossus of valour.

Not just because he spent five and a half years as a tortured prisoner of the Vietcong - shot out of sky, breaking both arms and a leg when he parachuted into a lake, later refusing an offer of release unless fellow American POWs were set free first - but because, when it mattered most, he rose above partisanship and rabid polarizing animus.

A political maverick who twice failed in a bid for the U.S. presidency - his selection of Sarah Palin for VP among his most ill-advised gambits - McCain spent six decades serving his nation, as an Air Force pilot from a dynastic military family, and through six terms as Arizona senator.

We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world.

McCain: Hero.

Donald Trump: Zero.

What a shallow, petulant wreck of a man is the president of the United States.

Bitter and vengeful to the end.

It may indeed have been hypocritical for Trump - his initial response to McCain’s death from brain cancer on Saturday limited to a 21-word tweet that made no mention of the senator as either a war hero or decades of public service - to have waxed more eloquently. But only the most churlish - and Trump knows churl - would have criticized him for it.

Instead, Trump’s niggardly behaviour served as a metaphor for the demise of civility in a country seized by unprecedented divisiveness and lowbrow vitriol.

He is congenitally incapable of unifying. He revels in chaos. He is a pathological liar. His pettiness is exceeded only by his deceitfulness, zigzagging with dodges and denials, endlessly fulminating or praising himself on Twitter in the early morning hours.

On Monday, during a media session announcing a new trade agreement with Mexico - Canada on the NAFTA negotiations sideline - Trump, stone-faced, studiously ignored shouted questions from journalists about McCain’s legacy, while aides drowned out the questioning, much the same way that “clap-out” minions step on reporters at Premier Doug Ford’s press conferences.

Not until late Monday, after two days of intense blowback, including scathing admonishment from veterans’ groups, did Trump grudgingly offer a more fulsome tribute, also signing a proclamation to fly the flag over the White House at half-mast until McCain is interred on Saturday. That flag - which represents the country, not Trump - had been lowered Saturday and raised to full-staff Monday morning.

Trump never misses an opportunity to debase himself and that flag.

Yet even then, Trump led with himself - “despite our differences on policy and politics” - because he never takes the high road.

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down. When we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

This, the president who disputed McCain’s warrior courage during the presidential campaign, deriding the decorated veteran as “not a war hero” because he’d spent all those years in captivity. “I like people that weren’t captured.”

But that was not the first time Trump - who five times deferred the Vietnam War draft, once on medical grounds for bone spurs in his feet - had mocked McCain’s war record. A video has recently resurfaced, from a 1991 interview with Dan Rather, in which he stated: “He was captured. Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

In these recent days, the president has single-handedly turned McCain’s death into a political firestorm all about Trump. That may have briefly pushed his tangle of legal issues off the front pages - last weekwas a disaster for the White House - but he actually antagonized the ultrapatriotic base that helped secure his presidential victory. Hence the rare reversal.

McCain’s death is a tremendous loss for his family, friends and colleagues. Almost as significantly, however, death silenced a voice which continued to speak for the integrity of a Republican Party that has woefully lost its way, all those pols who lack the stones to utter a peep of resistance, a whiff of ideological challenge.

It was McCain - belittled by many Republicans as a “Rino” (Republican in name only) - who walked slowly onto the floor of the Senate chamber last July, after he’d been diagnosed with brain cancer, and voted thumbs-down to permanently repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, leaving Trump’s signature legislation in tatters.

It was McCain who fought to have a report on American use of torture after 9/11 released because “the American people have a right - indeed a responsibility - to know what was done in their name.”

It was McCain who memorably released a statement to the Pakistani-American Khans, who son was killed in Iraq and then found themselves attacked by Trump: “Thank you for immigrating to America. We’re a better country because of you.”

It was McCain who championed bipartisan immigration reform that offered a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants without legal status, which put him at odds with his own party.

There were demerits on the other side of the ledger, of course. But McCain was usually a voice of sanity within a party that has lost its marbles.

We are 325 million opinionated vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.

Trump came to loathe McCain. Two weeks ago, in front of a military audience, he formally signed a defence bill known as the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act, without ever using McCain’s name.

It should be said, McCain often gave as good as he got.

In July, following Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, McCain slammed that awful joint press conference as “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in history.

“The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake. President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin. He and Putin seemed to be speaking from the same script as the president made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.”

Do not despair of our present difficulties. We believe always in the promise and greatness of America. Because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit, we never surrender, we never hide from history. We make history.

McCain left express instructions that Trump not attend his funeral. He asked that presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama deliver eulogies.

How will Trump be remembered, when his time comes?

Farewell fellow Americans. God bless you and God bless America.

Rosie DiManno is a national affairs columnist.