President Trump late Thursday stuck with his strategy of ignoring the multi-day memorial for Sen. John McCain, and sticking to the campaign themes that made him the surprise winner of the 2016 elections.
Trump threatened to make his Justice Department hand over documents to congressional Republicans. He slammed the media and the nation’s elites that continue to hound him.
But McCain was left alone, and hasn’t mentioned McCain on Twitter since Aug. 25, when he said, “My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!”
That tweet underscored the difficulty Trump seemed to be having with how to mark last weekend’s death of McCain, who became a full-time rival to Trump. The president declined to put out a formal statement about McCain for two days, and took heat for raising the flag above the White House to full staff less than two days after McCain died.
Late Thursday, Trump rejected the idea that he missed a chance to unite the country by offering a more heartfelt tribute to McCain.
“No, I don’t think I did at all,” Trump said. “I’ve done everything that they requested and no, I don’t think I have at all.”
But in Indiana, Trump said nothing to the crowd about McCain, even after McCain’s casket had just landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, and officials were preparing for McCain to lie in state at the Capitol for most of Friday.
The closest the rally came to a mention of McCain came from GOP Senate candidate Mike Braun, who noted that his Democratic incumbent opponent, Joe Donnelly, voted against Obamacare reform in a key Senate vote last year.
“And then when he could’ve had the deciding vote, he voted against repealing it,” Braun said.
Unmentioned was McCain’s famous, last-minute thumbs down vote in the Senate in 2017 that was seen as the surprise vote that prevented Republicans from advancing a plan to repeal Obamacare.
