Trump grabs a piece of McCain’s spotlight The White House returned flags to half-staff after Trump was criticized for perceived snubs of the late senator By Rebecca Morin and Stephane Murray
The moves were emblematic of President Donald Trump’s strained relationship with the late Sen. John McCain, a former GOP standard-bearer who identified as a Republican maverick long before the president arrived on the scene. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Donald Trump on Monday grabbed a piece of the spotlight back from the late Sen. John McCain, creating a familiar will-he-or-won’t-he narrative that ended with the White House formally ordering flags lowered to half-staff in remembrance.
An all-day outcry over the White House decision to raise the flags was finally resolved with a statement attributed to the president himself expressing “respect” for McCain’s service and announcing that he’d signed a proclamation ordering flags lowered until McCain is interred later this week.
The back and forth mirrored Trump’s actions over the weekend. He maintained steadfast silence on Friday, as Republicans and Democrats alike rushed to celebrate the longtime Arizona Republican senator after an announcement from his office that he was ending cancer treatment. The president remained quiet, finally tweeting a condolence Saturday after McCain’s death was announced.
The moves were emblematic of Trump’s strained relationship with McCain, a former GOP standard-bearer who identified as a Republican maverick long before Trump arrived on the scene with his own unique brand of iconoclastic politics.
“Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain’s service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment,” Trump said in a statement released by the White House.
McCain, a celebrated war hero and two-time presidential candidate, died late Saturday afternoon in his home state of Arizona after a battle with brain cancer.
In a posthumous statement, McCain took a jab at the president, implicitly criticizing Trump’s tendency to sow division and reward personal loyalty.
“We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe,” McCain said in his statement, which was read aloud at the Arizona state capitol by McCain’s longtime aide Rick Davis. “We weaken it when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.”
Trump had a strained relationship with McCain, suggesting at one point during the 2016 campaign that the senator, who was tortured as a POW during the Vietnam War, was not a war hero because he had been captured, and “I like people who weren’t captured.”
More recently, the president has often recalled, negatively, McCain’s deciding thumbs-down vote against a GOP bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Trump said in his statement that he asked Vice President Mike Pence to offer an address at the ceremony honoring McCain at the U.S. Capitol on Friday. Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and national security adviser John Bolton will also represent the Trump administration at the services, the president said.
In addition, military transportation has been authorized to move McCain’s remains from Arizona to Washington, D.C., along with the service of military pallbearers and band support. A horse and caisson transport was authorized for McCain’s service at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Although many flags in Washington, including at the Capitol and around the Washington Monument, remained at half-staff in McCain’s honor on Monday, the White House flag was not among them.
Joe Davis, director of communications for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said he heard the news at 7 a.m. that the flag had been returned to full staff. He contacted the White House at 8 a.m.
“We’re very, very happy that the flags have been lowered in honor of John McCain and will continue to be half-staff through his interment on Sunday,” Davis told POLITICO.
As of 4:20 p.m., however, flags were still flying at full staff over the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
The White House was also lambasted for its decision to not immediately issue a proclamation following McCain’s death Saturday.
The American Legion, a U.S. war veterans organization, prior to the proclamation had urged the Trump administration to “follow long-established protocol following the death of prominent government officials.”
“Mr. President, just this year, you released presidential proclamations noting the deaths of Barbara Bush and Billy Graham. Senator John McCain was an American hero and cherished member of The American Legion,” Denise Rohan, national commander of the American Legion, said in a statement. “On the behalf of The American Legion’s two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Sen. McCain’s death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation’s flag be half-staffed through his internment.”
The president shared his condolences for McCain’s family in a Saturday evening tweet that did not mention McCain’s legacy of military service or leadership in the Senate. His brief statement stood in stark contrast to the tributes to McCain that poured from nearly every corner of the U.S. political world and beyond, filling the front pages of newspapers across the country on Sunday. The New York Stock Exchange observed a moment of silence at 9:20 a.m. Monday in honor of McCain.
Ivanka Trump, daughter and adviser to the president, on Monday also went a step further than her father while sharing her condolences to the late senator’s family, calling McCain a “true hero.”
“I want to extend my deepest sympathies to the family of Sen. John McCain, an American patriot who served our country with distinction for more than six decades,” she said during her opening remarks at a meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington. “The nation is united in its grief, and the world mourns the loss of a true hero and a great statesman.”
Presidential proclamations for the death of a prominent U.S. official typically call for the flag to be lowered until the date of interment. McCain’s funeral is planned for Saturday.
One White House aide said that the flag fiasco may have been the result of ignorance and bureaucratic inertia.
Absent the issuance of a presidential proclamation, U.S. flag code dictates that the flag be lowered for a member of Congress “on the day of death and the following day” but no longer — a provision this person said senior presidential aides were unaware of.
As a result, the flag atop the White House was raised at midnight Monday following McCain’s death Saturday evening.
As the White House was inundated with criticism, aides scrambled to put together a proclamation that the president, who was welcoming Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and working to hash out a NAFTA fix with the Mexican government, didn’t get around to signing until late afternoon.
Trump has issued proclamations for others, including when the flag was flown at half-staff for four days after the death of former first lady Barbara Bush in April, and for eight days upon the death of Sen. John Glenn.
During the tenure of President Barack Obama, the White House marked the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by ordering U.S. flags lowered to half-staff for seven days.
McCain’s two opponents on the national campaign trail, former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, will deliver eulogies at a memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington on Saturday. McCain’s family had asked that Trump stay away from the funeral.
Former White House legislative director Marc Short, in an appearance on CNN on Monday, said Trump was doing the right thing by remaining relatively quiet in the wake of McCain’s death.
“If the president put out a flowery statement about John McCain’s life, the media would criticize it and say its not consistent with the other things he said in the past, and become a story about the president,” Short said. “The best thing the president can be doing right now is allow the family to celebrate his life.”
Eliana Johnson and Lorraine Woellert contributed to this report.
