I cannot let Donald Trump’s incessant, relentless and utterly classless attacks on a genuine American hero pass without comment.
The president launched the Mother of Twitter Tirades over the weekend. One of Trump’s targets, not surprisingly, was the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, the war hero who got under the president’s skin because of his fearless resistance to the president’s policies and pronouncements.
McCain died in August 2018 of brain cancer. He voted dramatically against a plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He also has challenged Trump’s style of confrontational governance and sought to restore a semblance of what he called “regular order” to the U.S. Senate.
Trump continues to attack the late senator. Why he persists is absolutely beyond me.
His latest attack against McCain challenged the senator’s release of information related to the “dossier” related to allegations that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russians who attacked our electoral system. Trump lied about the timing of when McCain leaked the dossier information to the FBI, saying he did so to harm Trump’s presidential campaign; the leak came after the November 2016 election.
Trump infamously declared in 2015 that McCain is “not a war hero. He’s a hero only because he was captured. I like people who aren’t captured. OK?” McCain served the nation heroically by any measure possible during the Vietnam War. He was shot down over Hanoi, taken captive and held for more than five yeas as a prisoner of war.
For the president of the United States — the commander in chief — to denigrate a war hero after avoiding military service during that war because of the questionable existence of bone spurs wreaks of indecency of the lowest order.
The McCain-Trump relationship went downhill from that moment.
And now that the senator has succumbed, the president continues to attack him. He continues his assault on the memory of a fellow Republican who contributed more in service to this country than the president ever will contribute. Ever!
Quite obviously none of us is privy to the president’s personal thoughts. We instead get to read his public pronouncements that, I’ll presume, put many of his private thoughts on the public record.
Donald Trump has shown us time and again what many of us already believe . . . that he disgraces this country.