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McCain gets last laugh
Sen. McCain's thumbs down vote on Obamacare repeal and replace caps a testy relationship with Trump
McCain's thumbs down caps contentious relationship with Trump
Story highlights
- Donald Trump ran for president, in part, vowing to break a mold John McCain fell into
- Trump's animosity for McCain was clear early in his 2016 presidential campaign
(CNN)With the tilt of his thumb, Sen. John McCain got the last laugh.
McCain
-- with a simple, yet dramatic, thumbs down on the Senate floor in the
wee hours of Friday morning -- signaled to the Senate, his colleagues
and the rest of the United States that he was not prepared to go along
with the latest Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.
After
the vote, the 80-year-old senator, who earlier this month was diagnosed
with brain cancer, was seen laughing with Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa
Murkowski, the two other Republicans who voted against the health care
bill.
Trump
fumed at the loss, tweeting that the three Republicans "let the
American people down," linking them to the Democrats who were uniformly
against the plan.
But, more than
just a vote in the Senate, the moment was the climactic cap of a years
long contentious relationship between McCain, a revered Capitol Hill
Republican and former presidential candidate whose recent brain cancer
diagnosis rocked Democrats and Republicans alike, and Trump, an
unexpected president whose 2015 attack on the Arizona senator was one of
the first crises in a campaign full of them.
Trump
ran for president, in part, on a pledge to break a mold that McCain
fell into. The longtime Arizona lawmaker worked his way up in the
Republican Party after years in the United States Navy, representing the
state in the House and Senate for over 25 years before he ran for
president in 2008.
Trump was
anathema to that, making a name for himself as a boisterous real estate
developer, reality TV star and political donor before he decided to make
the presidency his first foray into public office.
The
two men, despite representing the same party eight years apart, are
diametrically different. And Trump's animosity for McCain was clear
early in his 2016 run.
Sitting
before an audience in Iowa in July 2015, Trump argued that McCain, who
spent five years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, was not a
war hero because he was captured.
"He's not a war hero," Trump said. "He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."
The
comment -- which came after a week of back-and-forth between McCain and
Trump, including the Arizona senator telling reporters that Trump was
energizing the "crazies" in his party -- was an early inflection point
in Trump's campaign. Many Republicans condemned Trump for the comment,
including Sean Spicer, who later became the President's spokesman.
McCain, Spicer said, "is an American hero because he served his country and sacrificed more than most can imagine. Period."
Trump's
defense of himself over the McCain comment was scattershot. At first,
the presidential candidate denied that he ever said McCain wasn't a war
hero. Then seemingly justified the attacks by saying he was
"disappointed" that McCain has done "very little for the veterans."
Something Trump never did: Apologize.
An earlier booster of McCain
Trump was a McCain supporter in the early 2000s and endorsed the Arizona lawmaker during his run for president in 2008.
"I've
known him. I like him. I respect him. He's a smart guy and I think he's
going to be a great president," Trump told CNN months before the 2008
election.
Campaign finance records
show Trump had donated to McCain for years before the 2008 run,
including giving the legal maximum to his campaign in May 2008. The same
month, members of Trump's family -- wife Melania and children Donald
Jr, Ivanka and Eric -- also gave McCain the maximum individual donation
allowed under federal campaign finance laws.
Their relationship soured after the early support, however, highlighted by Trump questioning McCain's service.
McCain responded to Trump by asking him to apologize to other prisoners of war who he degraded.
"I
think he may owe an apology to the families of those who have
sacrificed in conflict and those who have undergone the prison
experience in serving their country," McCain said at the time. "I'm not a
hero. But those who were my senior ranking officers ... those that
inspired us to do things we otherwise wouldn't have been capable of
doing -- those are the people that I think he owes an apology to."
McCain
also declined to attack Trump's lack of military service, despite being
prodded to do so in numerous interviews. Trump had multiple student
deferments and one medical deferment.
Trump, despite the early controversy, would go on to win the Republican nomination and with it came McCain's hesitant support.
But the Arizona senator rarely held his fire on Trump when the Republican nominee found himself embroiled in controversy.
When
Trump questioned a judge's ability to decide a case because of his
Mexican heritage, McCain called the comment "very harmful."
And
when Trump attacked Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son -- Humayun Khan
-- was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq, after their speech at the
Democratic National Convention, McCain warned Trump.
"Arizona
is watching," he said. "While our party has bestowed upon him the
nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those
who are the best among us."
When
the tape of Trump casually describing sexual assault during a years old
interview with Access Hollywood was published by the Washington Post in
October, McCain broke with the Republican nominee.
"I
have wanted to support the candidate our party nominated," McCain said,
nodding to the fact he was a past nominee. "But Donald Trump's behavior
this week, concluding with the disclosure of his demeaning comments
about women and his boasts about sexual assaults, make it impossible to
continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy."
Despite
Republicans like McCain leaving Trump, the
businessman-turned-politician won in November. And so did McCain. The
Arizona senator won a sixth term the same day that Trump won the White
House, beating Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick in the process.
McCain makes plea for Senate to return to order 01:49
Continues to criticize Trump
The fact that Republicans accepted Trump did little to alleviate McCain's public critiques.
The
Arizona senator has called Trump's dealings with Russian diplomats
"deeply disturbing," called his plan to hike the Defense Department
budget "totally inadequate" and, more recently, called Trump's tweets
calling for a ban on transgender service men and women in the military
as "unclear" and unnecessary.
Trump's
presidency has further cemented the view, in the eyes of Capitol Hill
staffers and political watchers, that McCain has never felt beholden to
anyone other than voters in Arizona. But his contempt for Trump, these
Capitol Hill staffers said, has further caused McCain to embrace the
"maverick" nickname he embraced during the 2008 campaign.
Before
the Friday morning vote, McCain's cancer diagnosis had given many of
his colleagues a chance to herald him and his meaning to the Senate as
an institution.
Senate
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, called McCain a
"true figure," while Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican
and longtime McCain friend, said, "This disease has never had a more
worthy opponent."
Trump's response
to McCain's ailment was far more passive, and usually framed around how
Republicans needed his vote to pass health care.
After
McCain had surgery to remove a blood clot above his eye, Trump wished
him well at a White House event by calling him "crusty."
"And
I can tell you, we hope John McCain gets better very soon. Because we
miss him. He is a crusty voice in Washington," Trump said Monday to a
smattering of laughs before pausing and adding, "Plus, we need his
vote."
After McCain's diagnosis
was made public, Trump's written statement called him a "fighter," but
his in-person comments focused more on the practical need for his vote.
As
Capitol Hill and White House aides worked to move debate in the Senate,
McCain returned to the debate and Trump trumped the decision.
"John
McCain was great to show up. Big moment. We got the vote," Trump,
speaking with service men and women in Ohio, said about a preliminary
vote.
By Friday morning, though, Trump may have thought he needed to be careful what he wished for.
"It was," McCain said as he got into a car to head back to Arizona and begin radiation and chemotherapy, "the right vote."
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