Loading ...Just days after his diagnosis in July last year, he ignored medical advice and flew from Arizona to the Senate to vote down a Trump-backed plan to scrap Obama’s signature healthcare law. In October, he lambasted the president’s foreign policy as a “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems”. And last month, when Trump refused to back his own intelligence agencies over Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, McCain described it as “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory”.
And yet, future historians seeking to understand the man and his time will surely revisit that day in Dayton, when McCain forced a smile and introduced “the next vice-president of the United States, Governor Sarah Palin of the great state of Alaska”. They will consider what it foretold, and ponder why a man of decency and honour opened the door to demagoguery in America.