One Last Time, McCain Counterprograms Trump

Thursday morning, in images carried live on every major cable news network, the body of Sen. John McCain arrived at the North Phoenix Baptist Church in a hearse with the word “Dignity” on the rear window. Inside, the Republican senator was remembered, by a man who ran on a ticket against him, for a friendship that transcended political difference.

Thursday night, at an Indiana campaign rally carried live on Fox News, President Donald Trump accused his former opponent, Hillary Clinton, of “getting away with” unnamed misdeeds; attacked his own Justice Department and FBI for not “doing their job”; and taunted “elite” detractors: “I’m president, and they’re not.”

The broadcasts were separate. But they were not unrelated. They amounted to a last argument between the senator and the president who clashed with him in life (“I like people who weren’t captured”) and slighted him in death. They were competing programs with competing visions, not of policy, but of civic life.

McCain, who died Saturday, had no control over the president’s itinerary. But as an omnipresent Sunday-show guest who courted reporters on his “Straight Talk Express” campaign bus, he was not unaware in life of how things played on TV.

As he worked out the details of his ceremonies in his final days, he had to know that he was not only orchestrating his farewell. He was also counterprogramming the long-running, corrosive TV serial in which Trump is accustomed to being the star.

McCain planned the itinerary. He picked the music. (Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” played as the recessional.)

And he invited the speakers, especially — an unmistakable retort to the never-forgive-never-forget Trump spirit — his rivals.

On Saturday, former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of whom he ran against, will eulogize him in Washington. On Thursday, a succession of speakers led to former Vice President Joe Biden.

“My name’s Joe Biden,” he said. “I’m a Democrat. And I love John McCain.”

Biden’s speech was tender and empathetic, drawing on his own loss of his wife and children to sympathize with the McCain family. But it turned fiery, his voice roused to a holler, when he praised his colleague’s personal code.

“You could come to a different conclusion,” Biden said. “But where he’d part company with you is if you lacked the basic values of decency, respect, knowing that this project is bigger than yourself.”

If it wasn’t already clear, Biden was grieving more than the loss of a friend.

Biden did not confine his criticism to the Trump era. He recalled when party leaders warned him and McCain against being friendly on the Senate floor — “It doesn’t look good” — in the 1990s, which he said was “when things began to change for the worse.”

Pundits on cable saw the anecdote as a challenge to the senators at the service. But he could as well have been addressing the networks themselves, and the environment of strife they thrive in. The 1990s, after all, were not just the era of culture war and the Clinton impeachment, but also when Fox and MSNBC joined CNN on the air.

No one mentioned Trump by name, though Tommy Espinoza, a Democrat who spoke for McCain at the 2008 Republican National Convention, said of his friend, “What he knew was that we all make America great.”

McCain pointedly did not invite Trump. And what if he had? It’s nearly impossible to imagine Trump carrying out an unwritten responsibility of office in the TV era: comforting the bereaved, speaking with kindness of someone with whom he disagreed, putting another person’s memory before his own presence.

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.

Trump did not say anything about McCain in his hour-plus Indiana appearance. The rally was standard Trump combo platter, casting 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 FBI arrested a man for threatening to kill Boston Globe employees, using 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.”

McCain’s colleagues remembered a man who was a friend even while they fought. 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 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 Trump has made clear, it is not something we can expect, for the moment anyway, in this life.