John McCain: The Anti-Trump

[EasyAce]

By Matt Welch
http://reason.com/archives/2017/09/09/john-mccain-the-anti-trump

For both good and ill, Sen. John McCain of Arizona is the closest the Republican Party has to the
opposite of Donald Trump. He is the moral conscience that promises to check the president's excesses,
and he is the hypocritical Washington lifer whose cynical rhetoric and interventionist passions helped
create the Trumpian backlash in the first place.

McCain, who was diagnosed with brain cancer in July, famously spent five-plus years imprisoned in
Vietnam; Trump meanwhile received five deferments exempting him from the conflict. Trump believes
that torture "absolutely works," and on the campaign trail advocated violating Geneva Convention
prohibitions and overruling his own military brass if need be. (He later backtracked on the latter threat.)
McCain, an actual victim of torture, is the leading Republican opponent of the practice, arguing that it
"doesn't work" as an intelligence-gathering tool.

Trump almost never apologizes for his inflammatory statements, including his notorious crack about
McCain's heroism: "I like people that weren't captured, OK?" McCain's extravagant apologies are
almost as well-known on Capitol Hill as the temper that makes them necessary. When he still had
a fighter's chance against Barack Obama for the presidency, McCain publicly rejected attempts by
the GOP base to portray the then-senator as an "Arab" or even a "socialist." Trump, on the other
hand, refused to fully disavow the birther conspiracy theory until September 2016 . . .

. . . McCain's political cynicism and insincerity, too, made Trumpism more attractive. In 2006 and
2013, the Arizona senator was the GOP point man on bipartisan efforts to craft comprehensive
immigration reform. But whenever he was up for a tough election—against Obama in 2008, or
against immigration hawk J.D. Hayworth for Senate in 2010—McCain pandered grossly to the
base, rejecting bills he'd previously co-sponsored and vowing to "complete the danged fence."

Because members of the press like him, McCain's many missteps and hypocrisies are routinely
portrayed as expedient deviations from what journalists are convinced is "the real McCain."
(In the most succinct two-sentence version of the genre, New York magazine columnist Jonathan
Chait wrote in 2006: "Go ahead, senator, flip-flop away. I know you're with us at heart.")
It is from such gaseous behavior that the phrase "drain the swamp" draws potency . . .

. . . As the media begin cranking out what might be their final round of encomia for the man, let
us not overlook how he—and they—helped give rise to the president they both so despise.