WASHINGTON — John McCain’s daughter and two former presidents led a public rebuke of President Donald Trump’s divisive politics at the late senator’s memorial service Saturday in a call for a return to civility among the nation’s leaders.
The nearly three-hour service at the Washington National Cathedral was a remarkable show of defiance against a president McCain openly defied in life as the antithesis of the American spirit of service to something greater than any individual.
Standing near McCain’s flag-draped casket and with Trump’s daughter in the audience, Meghan McCain delivered a broadside against the uninvited president without mentioning his name.
“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness — the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served,” she said, her voice first choking back tears. Then, it rose in anger.
“The America of John McCain,” she added, with a reference to Trump’s trademark phrase, “has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”
The audience of Washington power players erupted in applause.
Trump has dismissed the idea that McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, was a hero. The president made clear he resented McCain’s thumbs-down vote last year that sank the Republican attempt to repeal national health care. And he only marked McCain’s passing on Aug. 25 with traditional presidential actions after he came under fire from the American Legion.
Trump chose to head to his Virginia golf course during Saturday’s service and tweeted his grievances against the FBI and NAFTA throughout the day. In one missive, he misspelled former President Barack Obama’s first name. He sent Ivanka Trump, her husband Jared Kushner, Defense Secretary James Mattis and others to the service to represent the administration.
McCain asked Obama, a Democrat, and George W. Bush, a Republican, to speak at his memorial service and they gave personal testimony that overcoming rivalries and partisan politics was not only possible but good for the country.
