During a speech he gave Monday
night,
in Philadelphia, where the National Constitution Center was bestowing
upon him its Liberty Medal, John McCain didn’t once mention Donald
Trump. He didn’t need to. The eighty-one-year-old Republican senator,
who is suffering from brain cancer, began his remarks by recounting the
days he shared in the Senate with Joe Biden, the former Vice-President,
who had introduced him to the crowd and praised his sense of duty. Even
though the two of them often differed on policy, McCain said, they
“believed in each other’s patriotism and the sincerity of each other’s
convictions. . . . We believed in our mutual responsibility to help make
the place work and to coöperate in finding solutions to our country’s
problems.”

This sounded like a stab at the current political climate in Washington,
and it echoed what McCain said in July, when he helped to vote down one
of the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare. But the Arizonan hadn’t
travelled to Philadelphia merely to wax lyrical on the virtues of
bipartisanship. “What a privilege it is to serve this big, boisterous,
brawling, intemperate, striving, daring, beautiful, bountiful, brave,
magnificent country,” he said, alluding to his sixty years in the Navy
and in Washington. “We are living in the land of the free, the land
where anything is possible, the land of the immigrant’s dream . . . the
land that repairs and reinvents itself, the land where a person can
escape the consequences of a self-centered youth and know the
satisfaction of sacrificing for an ideal, the land where you can go from
aimless rebellion to a noble cause, and from the bottom of your class to
your party’s nomination for President.”

In the last bit of that purple passage, McCain was presumably referring
to himself. (Although it would be interesting to see Trump’s school
records.) “We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in
turn,” McCain went on. “The international order we helped build from the
ashes of world war . . . has liberated more people from tyranny and
poverty than ever before in history. This wondrous land has shared its
treasures and ideals and shed the blood of its finest patriots to help
make another, better world. And, as we did so, we made our own
civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous than the
America that existed when I watched my father go off to war on December
7, 1941.”

In this potted history, historians would find things to argue with. So
would the citizens of countries such as Chile, the Dominican Republic,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, and Vietnam—places where
the soaring rhetoric of Pax Americana was put into practice in far from
lofty ways. Still, many analysts would agree with McCain that American
hegemony has helped to maintain global order, and that the United States
has benefitted greatly from its role as the leading global superpower. “To
fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a
century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to
refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to
remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked,
spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find
scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to
any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash
heap of history,” McCain said.

A student of Strunk & White would have skipped more quickly to the
phrase “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would
rather find scapegoats than solve them.” The term “unpatriotic” was also
partially shrouded in circumlocution. And yet McCain’s message was
clear. “We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil,” he
continued. “We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their
champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership
has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy
as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and
we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not
thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We
wouldn’t deserve to.”

The reaction to McCain’s speech was predictable: threats from Trump and
fury from some of his supporters. “Yeah, well, I hear it,” Trump told the radio host Chris Plante on Tuesday morning. “And people have to be
careful because at some point I fight back. I’m being very nice. I’m
being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back, and it won’t be
pretty.” Bill Mitchell, a conservative talk-show host and social-media
agitator, tweeted,
“#JohnMcCain comes out against Nationalism. Is there anything about this man I don’t
hate?”

Of course, McCain didn’t come out against nationalism. As his
speeches, voting record, and life story indicate, there are few American
politicians more nationalistic than he is. But in his mind nationalism
matches the dictionary definition: “loyalty and devotion to a nation.”
Rather than seeking to disavow nationalism, he was clearly trying to
reclaim it from those—Trump, Steve Bannon, and others—who are selling a
bastardized version of the concept, one that he considers ahistorical and
self-defeating.

McCain has described his medical prognosis as “very poor,” and several
times in his speech he hinted that he is living with a pressing
sense of his own mortality. But the question is: Having gone this far in
taking a stand against Trump, how much further will McCain go? Talking
to reporters on Tuesday morning, he coyly denied that his words had been
targeted at the President exclusively. “I was referring to the whole
atmosphere and environment,” he said. “There’s a whole lot of people
besides the President who have said ‘America First.’ ” This was typical
of McCain, who revels in the spotlight and often proceeds in zigzag
fashion. But he has also been in Washington long enough to know how—on
the heels of Senator Bob Corker calling the White House an “adult day
care center”—his speech would be received as the second time in two
weeks that a senior Republican has suggested that Trump, and Trumpism,
is a menace to the country.

We can only hope that, at some point soon, Corker, McCain, or some other
influential G.O.P. figure will summon the courage to state publicly the
obvious corollary: since the President is a menace to the United States,
he ought to be removed from office. So far, McCain hasn’t gone anywhere
near that level. But we know that he isn’t the type to be intimidated.
“It’s fine with me,” he said, when asked about Trump’s threat to “fight
back.” “I’ve faced some fairly significant adversaries in the past.”