Trump doesn't let death interrupt his feud with McCain

If you thought something as consequential as death would get in the way of President Donald Trump's long-running feud with the late Sen. John McCain, you didn't know how petty our president could be.

The president's painfully reluctant approach to memorializing his fellow Republican, who died Saturday at 81 in his Arizona home, was about as gracious as Madonna's self-obsessed (Me! Me! Me!) tribute to Aretha Franklin at MTV's recent Video Music Awards.

Trump apparently thought that acknowledging the senator's passing with a generic-sounding tweet would suffice, along with a ceremonial lowering of the White House flags to half-staff until Monday morning, ignoring the tradition of leaving the flag at half-staff for deceased members of Congress until their interment.

Even when Trump's tweet of condolence, which offered "deepest sympathies and respect" and "hearts and prayers" to McCain's family, was reposted on Trump's Instagram page with a large picture, it was a picture of Trump.

After angry messages poured in from veterans groups and other Americans, the White House flags were lowered again to half-staff in accordance with a Washington norm that even our Great Disruptor president ignores at his political peril.

Frankly, I still find it ironic that a president who thrills his fans by literally hugging American flags at his rallies -- and lambastes NFL players for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality -- could be so clueless about proper flag etiquette at his main workplace, the White House.

But this president was not about to let a moment of national grief get in the way of his personal grudge -- until he had to.

The feud goes back at least to Trump's launch of his presidential campaign in the summer of 2015. After Trump attacked Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug criminals and promised to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, McCain was appalled. Trump, McCain charged, was "firing up the crazies" with his views.

That's the "maverick" McCain, whose old-school conservatism still valued the art of compromise. Half a loaf was better than gridlock. He could disagree with liberals like me on taxes, abortion or Iraq, but win my admiration with his opposition to torture as an interrogation tool (he experienced its dubious value firsthand as a prisoner of war in Vietnam) and his support for comprehensive immigration reform -- a position for which he was booed at the 2008 Conservative Political Action Conference, which had a better handle on the rightward tilt the GOP was taking.

McCain directed his "crazies" label at the ultraconservatives, white nationalists and full-moonbeam conspiracy theorists -- including the "birthers" who believed Barack Obama was secretly a Kenya-born Muslim and other wack-a-doodle ideas -- that he saw as barnacles on the Grand Old Party's bulkheads.

But a lot of conservatives who don't see themselves that way took umbrage, rejected McCain's position and later flocked to Trump. Less than a month after McCain called Trump's supporters "crazies," Trump fired back at a campaign event in Iowa. The former reality TV star declared that McCain, a Navy pilot who survived more than five years as a POW in North Vietnam's notorious "Hanoi Hilton," was not a war hero. "He's a war hero because he was captured," Trump scoffed. "I like people that weren't captured, OK?"

When I hear that sound bite, I think of "Cadet Bone Spurs." That's the nickname that Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a double amputee after being shot down as an Army helicopter pilot in Iraq, gave Trump on Twitter for the medical condition that helped him to receive one of his five deferments from the Vietnam-era draft.

Nevertheless, McCain backed Trump as the GOP nominee until the "Hollywood Access" videotape surfaced with Trump's lewd remarks about groping and kissing women. McCain angrily withdrew his support, saying Trump should "suffer the consequences" of his remarks.

Most dramatically, McCain cast the vote that killed a Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, a major Trump campaign promise along with his proposed border wall, which may never materialize either.

News that the late senator wanted two former presidents, George W. Bush and Obama, to deliver eulogies at his funeral but didn't want the current president to attend at all may have been too much for Trump to take. He didn't get to have the last word. Not in this world, anyway.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)