In McCain Eulogies, Daughter Meghan and Barack Obama Take Aim at Trump
It was a pretty spectacular snub by the late Sen. John McCain to not only request that the nation’s sitting president be excluded from McCain’s funeral services at Washington National Cathedral on Saturday, but also to ask former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to deliver the eulogies.
The swipes at President Donald Trump didn’t end there.
With key members of the Trump administration and family in attendance—including Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, John Kelly, John Bolton, and Rudy Giuliani— McCain’s daughter, Meghan, indirectly criticized Trump during her own tearful eulogy.
“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,” Meghan McCain said.
She drew applause when she added, “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”
Later, Obama said, “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty. Trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but in fact, is born of fear.”
He added: “John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.”
Trump, meanwhile, spent the morning Saturday sending a flurry of unrelated tweets, including after television news coverage of McCain’s services already had begun broadcasting live from Washington. In the tweets, Trump attacked the news media, Canada, FISA courts, the Justice Department, the FBI, Hillary Clinton, and NAFTA, and the sitting president claimed his constitutional rights had somehow been violated.
In one rambling tweet, he even misspelled Obama’s first name.
As politicians from across the political spectrum—both past and present—capped a week of lengthy remembrances of, and tributes to, McCain, who died last Saturday at 81, Trump arrived at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, VA, his 152nd day at a Trump golf club as president.