Many political observers like to think of President Donald Trump’s greatest enemies as occupying positions on the political Left amongst progressives and Democrats. But it’s also no secret that a few members of Trump’s own party are far from the former real estate magnate’s friends, as both members of the Bush family and Mitt Romney showed during the 2016 presidential election.
Other Republicans who were at the very least reticent or non-committal as far as supporting Trump included House Speaker Paul Ryan, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, Ohio Governor John Kasich and Arizona Senator John McCain. Coincidentally, there is evidence that all of these politicians plus Senator Marco Rubio of Florida have received funds in 2016 from employees of progressive billionaire financier George Soros.
Although McCain initially claimed he supported Trump’s election bid as early as May 3 and as late as early October of last year, McCain rescinded his support for Trump in the wake of the latter’s infamous “Access Hollywood” tape containing lewd remarks becoming public, declining to say who he voted for in the November general election.
Looking back, one can see that substantial friction between the president and the Arizona senator came to a head on or about the date of July 18 of 2015, when McCain referred to a room full of Trump supporters as “crazies.” In retaliation, Trump was asked about McCain’s POW status in the Vietnam War and famously said of the Navy veteran, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
But the heated words of the two men may belie deeper disagreements that go back further than that. The fact of the matter is that the worldview of the two men are completely at odds; McCain is an unabashed neoconservative globalist who has taken the side of Muslims when he accused Fox News of prejudice for criticizing the use of the expression “Allahu Akbar”; he’s firmly supported virtually every foreign war (most notoriously Iraq) the United States has gotten involved with practically since his birth.
In contrast, Trump ran on a platform of rejecting globalist values and pulling the U.S. out of expensive overseas conflicts (especially Iraq) and wasteful international alliances. McCain has supported free-trade agreements such as the Transpacific Partnership (TPP), open borders and refugee inflows to the U.S., while Donald Trump has been a vehement opponent of all of these items from the beginning of his presidential campaign.
In 2016, McCain, running for his sixth term as Senator, faced a challenger in Kelli Ward, an Arizona state senator and major supporter of Trump. McCain has been in Congress for a total of 34 years, mostly in the Senate, and was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, famously losing to Barack Obama.
Probably fearing a backlash from voters who were endeared to the presidential frontrunner yet also in support of his Senatorial candidacy, McCain kept his mouth shut about Trump and his opinion of him. But sometime after October 8, McCain began to return to a position of opposition to the Republican nominee that he’d taken prior to May in 2016.
Indeed, the war of words between McCain and Trump is beginning to reach a new low as the senator ramped up comments that seemed designed to hurt the president. In multiple news articles, McCain was quoted as saying that Trump’s recent description of the news media as “the enemy” was wrong, and “that is how dictators get started.”
Along with Lindsey Graham, McCain was critical of Trump for the latter’s alleged connections with Russia. In response, the president tweeted, “The two senators should focus their energies on ISIS, illegal immigration and border security, instead of always looking to start World War III.” (Of course, it doesn’t help that McCain was famously photographed in 2013 with a man who may or may not have been the leader of ISIS.)
Furthermore, at the recent Munich Security Conference in Germany in mid-February, McCain — absent from the Senate during crucial nomination hearings for new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt — defended the U.S.’s foreign policy status quo as supported by ex-President Obama. This status quo includes the United States propping up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with more than its fair share of monetary dues.
Meanwhile, Trump has called NATO “obsolete” and says that at the very least if it continues to exist, all member nations need to pay their fair share for it. McCain stated to his European friends that “[the founders of this conference] would be alarmed by an increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, race and sectarianism.”
Instead of “universal values,” McCain could just as easily have substituted the word “globalism” and his meaning would have been the same. And by the same token, by referencing “blood, race and sectarianism,” McCain clearly was referring to the supposed values of “nationalism,” although the nationalism he meant was military nationalism, rather than the political and economic nationalism that Donald Trump promoted tirelessly during his presidential campaign.
With his speech, McCain was also subtly invoking attacks on Trump advisors and strategists Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, both of whom have falsely been accused (by Democrats) of harboring racist and factionalist values.
A February 18 profile of McCain in New York magazine quotes McCain advisors John Weaver, Mark Salter and Bill Kristol — all well-known neoconservatives who were an integral part of the #NeverTrump movement opposing the eventual Republican nominee well into the autumn of 2016.
The article confesses that “to an extent far greater than McCain himself will say, [aides] describe McCain as finding Trump to be a TRUE THREAT TO THE REPUBLIC.” Speaking for himself, McCain compared Trump’s relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the alliance between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in 1939. Clearly, in McCain’s mind, Putin is a surrogate for Russian leader Stalin while Trump is a surrogate for — well, you can guess who.
In the meantime, McCain’s Senate Intelligence Committee is probing ties between the Trump administration and Russia. Lest readers forget, it was McCain who gave the so-called “dirty dossier” on Trump (with its allegations of Russian prostitutes and misbehavior by the then-President-elect in a Moscow hotel) that was supposed to have come from British intelligence to the FBI.
This same dossier had its origins in the #NeverTrump movement, after which time it was added to by Democrats and took on a life of its own within the MI6 British spy service. This was before it was “leaked” to Buzzfeed and CNN and generated a trove of “fake news” articles and several awkward White House press conference statements.
When asked about these leaks, McCain defended his actions and leaks in general, saying, “In democracies, information should be provided to the American people. How else are the American people going to be informed?” McCain says of the dossier in the profile, “I didn’t know what to make of it,” but when asked about the potential impeachment of Trump later in the article, McCain states coolly, “We’re clearly not there yet.”
For Trump, it’s the last word in this statement that ought to give him pause, as some insiders might say that the senator is practically salivating over the prospect of the possible removal of the president from power.
Power is something that’s not foreign to McCain, who also chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, responsible for appropriating a budget of nearly $600 billion to the nation’s military. It should be noted that Trump’s picks for the Secretary of the Army, Vincent Viola, and for the Secretary of the Navy, Philip Bilden, have withdrawn and nearly withdrawn, respectively, their names from consideration for those posts due to alleged conflicts of interest.
For Trump, this may be a harbinger of what’s to come as McCain seeks to use the full extent of his Senatorial power to effect an agenda that in all likelihood is not 100 percent his own.
