Senator Lindsey Graham once described his friend John McCain as someone who would “run across the street to get in a good fight.”
McCain’s final battle came straight to him.
I’m not talking about the one against brain cancer, which has kept the 81-year-old senator at home in Arizona for months and prompted many friends, including Joe Biden, to travel there recently to see him, possibly for the last time. I’m talking about the one against Donald Trump.
McCain has waged it in public remarks since Trump’s election, including a speech in Philadelphia last October, when he pushed back against the “half-baked, spurious nationalism” that was gripping too many Americans and lamented the abdication of America’s moral leadership in the world.
He wages it in a forthcoming book, “The Restless Wave,” an advance excerpt of which includes his complaint that Trump fails “to distinguish the actions of our government from the crimes of despotic ones” and that he prioritizes “a reality-show facsimile of toughness” over “any of our values.”
