Fourteen years ago, Ronald Reagan died. From the breaking reports of Reagan’s death on June 5, through his elaborate ceremonial procession down Constitution Avenue on June 9, to the former president’s state funeral — which drew more than 35 million television viewers — on June 11, the national mourning for Reagan was the biggest U.S. news spectacle since 9/11. Reagan is a conservative icon, the archetypal figurehead who most other Republican leaders aspire to be. But Reagan’s chummy, paternalistic manner, and his Cold War heroism, afforded him classic bipartisan acclaim. In the national commemoration, Reagan’s rhetorical flourishes and his overall stateliness defined him, and the former president’s actual politics became somewhat beside the point.
On Saturday, Arizona Senator John McCain died after a year-long medical battle with a brain tumor. The former Republican presidential nominee — a “maverick” who feuded bitterly with President Donald Trump — will now undergo a similar canonization. Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama will speak at McCain’s memorial service in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, and former vice president Joe Biden will address an earlier memorial service in Arizona. In the meantime, Trump has awkwardly refused to celebrate McCain, who prohibited the president from attending his funeral. Among McCain’s final political assessments was a withering criticism of Trump’s disastrous July summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate,” McCain wrote.
In the Republican context, McCain and Reagan were dissimilar figureheads. Reagan helped forge the modern Republican identity; McCain built a reputation by occasionally challenging the brand. McCain’s biggest fans will say he reliably defied his party’s consensus and resisted its worst impulses; they will say this despite his aggressive support for the Iraq War and his formative empowerment of Trumpism by nominating the know-nothing Sarah Palin as his presidential running mate. To dwell on these key decisions in McCain’s political career is to risk impoliteness. No longer a legislator, McCain now exists as an abstracted legacy, a myth as bland, inoffensive, and incomplete as the nation’s basic knowledge about the founding fathers. John McCain was, simply, great.
In death, McCain retains a certain urgent significance among centrists and conservatives who oppose Trump. McCain died, Trump outlives him, and so McCain’s passing marks the latest phase of Trump’s domination. Reagan’s death may have provoked some hyperbolic praise, but it did not suggest, as McCain’s death seems to suggest, some grave decline in the Republican Party’s integrity or the country’s chances of surviving another week. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy’s death nine years ago provoked no crisis in the liberal imagination; Obama and the congressional Democrats enshrined Kennedy’s tumultuous legacy in the form of Obamacare, a fittingly tumultuous bit of legislation. McCain passed on a far more perilous note. The late senator’s friends, colleagues, and supporters regard him as a superhero whose demise spells certain doom for the rest of us. Meanwhile, McCain’s critics regard him as a con man who “earned” his supposedly rebellious reputation through pretense, misdirection, and the dark art of marketing. So McCain’s mourning has been a contentious phase. The late McCain’s archenemy, Trump, repeatedly disparaged the senator and discounted his wartime heroics as well as his peacetime chivalry. Now, Trump “honors” McCain with inconsistent flag protocols and an initial refusal to comment beyond his awkward tweet about the rogue Arizona senator who ruined his initial legislative coup against Obamacare.
McCain only rarely lived up to his own mythology. His GOP colleagues won’t even try. If anything, McCain’s death might finally absolve Republicans of any lingering, whimsical expectation that the party might resist Trump’s dismal direction.
Through his war record and then his gallant political mode, McCain embodied a hodgepodge of supposedly endangered virtues, including honor, candor, bipartisan zeal, and, above all, respectability. In this century — after selling himself out to Charles Keating during his first Senate term in the late 1980s — McCain conferred rare and nebulous dignity to the Congress, an institution that most Americans distrust. But McCain’s acclaim tends to include one additional virtue that never really suited Barry Goldwater’s successor — civility. If anything, John McCain was a famously vulgar guy. He was friendly, but crass; hotheaded, sarcastic, and reliably scathing. Publicly, McCain referred to his Vietnamese captors as “gooks.” Privately, he lashed out against his wife, Cindy McCain, describing her as a “trollop” and a “cunt.” He spared no ad hominems in any phase of his political career.
The main evidence to recommend McCain’s civility is a single, infamous clip from the 2008 presidential campaign — the moment when a McCain supporter at a televised rally disputes Barack Obama’s citizenship (“he’s an Arab”), and McCain corrects her by insisting that his opponent is “a decent family man, a citizen.” McCain’s friends and fans have incorporated the footage into their tributes, and the video clip itself has become a point of contention. Why does McCain seem to suggest that Obama’s being “a decent family man, a citizen” is the definitive proof that he’s not “an Arab”? Why do McCain’s admirers cite the exchange as evidence of McCain’s decency rather than proof of the bigotry that animates his party and empowers its campaigns?
McCain’s “maverick” reputation predates Trump’s political career. The term originated as candidate marketing copy so savvy that it passed smoothly into myth. McCain would have enjoyed the characterization, and all its attendant fondness, even if he’d passed away during Hillary Clinton’s first presidential term instead. But Trump has, unwittingly, enriched McCain’s legacy while, subtly, disgracing McCain’s style. In his relatively brief political career, Trump has cannibalized McCain’s politics of candor and produced an extreme, grotesque variation. Trump has turned “straight talk,” McCain’s signature political ideal, into nothing but slurs.
