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Trump Offers Condolences to Family of McCain, Senator Who Defied Him

President Donald Trump offered his “deepest sympathies and respect” to the family of Sen. John McCain on Saturday night, setting aside a yearslong, bitter and often deeply personal feud between the two men that had lasted into the senator’s final days.

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By
SARAH MERVOSH
and
ALAN YUHAS, New York Times

President Donald Trump offered his “deepest sympathies and respect” to the family of Sen. John McCain on Saturday night, setting aside a yearslong, bitter and often deeply personal feud between the two men that had lasted into the senator’s final days.

The president shared his condolences in a brief tweet, shortly after it was announced that McCain, who had been battling brain cancer, had died.

“Our hearts and prayers are with you!” he said.

The White House flag was lowered to half-staff Saturday in honor of McCain.

But as former presidents and other politicians from both parties lauded McCain’s character and patriotism, Trump’s brief comment focused on the family of the Republican senator from Arizona. Although of the same generation and political party, the two men had expressed a distaste for one another since Trump catapulted onto the political scene as a candidate for president in 2015.

McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who rose to power as a prominent Republican politician, emerged as an early and vocal critic of Trump. He condemned Trump’s remarks about women, unauthorized immigrants and the family of a slain Muslim Army captain during the presidential campaign. He withdrew support for Trump about a month before Election Day after a recording was released on which Trump spoke about groping women.

At one point, Trump, who received draft deferments and never served in the military, belittled McCain’s war record.

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said at a Republican presidential forum in Iowa in 2015. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Once Trump entered the Oval Office, McCain generally supported the administration’s policies and nominees, including a $1.5 trillion tax cut and the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as a justice on the Supreme Court. But in key moments, the senator remained a forceful adversary, and neither man yielded as McCain battled terminal illness.

McCain thwarted a Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act last year, returning to the Senate floor after his brain cancer diagnosis to cast a dramatic thumbs-down vote. More recently, McCain issued a statement critical of Trump’s summit meeting in Helsinki with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, calling it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”

This month, as McCain was ailing, Trump gave a 28-minute speech about a bill named for McCain — but did not mention the senator.

Elsewhere, McCain’s long military and political history — and his willingness to at times defy the Republican agenda — won him praise from both parties at the end of his life.

President Barack Obama, who defeated McCain in the 2008 presidential election, said in a statement Saturday night that “we shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher — the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched and sacrificed.”

Obama also alluded to McCain’s military service, saying: “All of us can aspire to the courage to put the greater good above our own. At John’s best, he showed us what that means. And for that, we are all in his debt.”

Including Obama, every living former president released statements commemorating McCain. President George W. Bush, who won the Republican nomination for president over McCain in 2000, said in his statement: “Some lives are so vivid, it is difficult to imagine them ended. Some voices are so vibrant it is hard to imagine them stilled.”

Vice President Mike Pence, in his own statement on Twitter, honored McCain’s “lifetime of service to this nation in our military and in public life.”

“God bless John McCain,” he said.

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