John McCain's Funeral Was the Biggest Resistance Meeting Yet

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John McCain’s Funeral Was the Biggest Resistance Meeting Yet




Two ex-Presidents and one eloquent daughter teamed up to rebuke the pointedly uninvited Donald Trump.


https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/john-mccains-funeral-was-the-biggest-resistance-meeting-yet

By Susan B. Glasser

5:47 P.M.

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were in attendance as the casket bearing Senator John McCain arrived at the Washington National Cathedral on Saturday.
Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP




Donald Trump’s name was never mentioned. It didn’t have to be. The funeral service for John Sidney McCain III, at the Washington National Cathedral, on this swampy Saturday morning, was all about a rebuke to the pointedly uninvited current President of the United States, which was exactly how McCain had planned it.

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This was made clear a few minutes into the two-and-a-half-hour service, when McCain’s daughter Meghan, weeping at times, called it a funeral for nothing less than “the passing of American greatness” that her father represented, and not the “cheap rhetoric” that now passes for it. Later, her voice breaking, she said, “The America of John McCain does not need to be made great again, because it is already great.” Her eulogy was then interrupted by applause, the first time I have heard such a thing at a funeral in that great, cavernous, and sombre Episcopalian hall. She hadn’t uttered the name of the “President Non Grata,” as the Washington Post recently referred to Trump, nor did she need to. Midway through her remarkable speech, a pool report from the White House was released. Trump, wearing a white “Make America Great Again” hat, and having tweeted his morning complement of bile, directed at Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller, and his own Justice Department, had departed to play golf.

Before he died, McCain had personally enlisted Trump’s two Presidential predecessors to speak at the service, and when they came to the lectern both George W. Bush and Barack Obama fulfilled the role they had been assigned, offering tributes to the man they had each beaten in an election, as well as odes to the American political system they all loved. In any other context, maybe it would not seem to be a stinging criticism to hear Obama praise the “rule of law.” But Trump is the inescapable context of these times in Washington. “Perhaps above all,” Bush said, “John detested the abuse of power.” When Bush talked about McCain’s dedication to America’s leadership in the world and his hatred of tyrants, how many of those listening thought of the current President’s praise for many of those same dictators whom McCain had been so proud to oppose? Of course they thought of it. That was the point.


In the line of his address that is sure to be its most quoted, Obama seemed to describe both Trump and the divisive way in which he has chosen to lead the country. “So much of our politics can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult, in phony controversies and manufactured outrage,” Obama said. “It’s a politics that pretends to be brave, but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.” Heads nodded. Democratic heads and Republican ones alike. For a moment, at least, they still lived in the America where Obama and Bush and Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney could all sit in the same pew, in the same church, and sing the same words to the patriotic hymns that made them all teary-eyed at the same time. When the two Presidents were done speaking, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” blared out. This time, once again, the battle is within America. The country’s leadership, the flawed, all too human men and women who have run the place, successfully or not, for the past few decades, were all in the same room, at least for a few hours on a Saturday morning. The President of the United States, however, was not...................................