a great american has passed
Your post doesn’t match your headline who died? McCain or a great American?
McCain didn't back down
He was one of just three Republican senators to vote against - and thus defeat - a Trump-backed effort to repeal Barack Obama's signature health-care law. That single vote earned lasting disdain from the president.
But McCain did not back down. In an op-ed article in the Washington Post, he called the president "impulsive" and "often poorly informed." In a prepared speech that seemed directed at the president and his aides, McCain denounced the "spurious nationalism" of people who "would rather find scapegoats than solve problems."
And when an October 2017 interview turned to the subject of service in the Vietnam War - a profoundly marking experience in McCain's own life - he did not hold back.
"One aspect of the conflict, by the way, that I will never countenance is that we drafted the lowest-income level of America, and the highest-income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur," he said. "That is wrong. That is wrong." The allusion to the medical deferment that saved a young Donald Trump from serving in that war could not have been clearer.
The patent contempt the two men displayed for each other showed no sign of fading, even as McCain continued to weaken.
A few weeks ago, Trump could not even bring himself to say McCain's name during a signing ceremony for a defence funding bill that fellow senators had named in the Arizona lawmaker's honour.