John McCain’s funeral will not change a thing. Trump knows his electorate. If the funeral was a threat, he would tweet about it. Voters do not see national significance in McCain’s death. Only those on the political inside care.
What is mourned, besides the man, is the loss of prestige and the veneer of civility. Trump nakedly displays the enduring truth our country is an oligarchy. The added sadness surrounding McCain’s funeral and its cable news coverage is the political class realizing it can no longer pretend we live in a democracy. Public toadying to superiors is now required, when in the past, submission was only expected behind closed doors.
This funeral was not a scripted “war council” or “resistance meeting.” It was no more than a memorial service for the old order’s demise. Eulogists may believe they sent messages against Trump, but that is the problem. The effort was too subtle. Voters do not see their oblique references and polite rebukes.
If McCain really wanted resistance around his death, his final words would have read something like this.
Dear Fellow Republicans, Trump must be impeached as soon as possible before the buffoon does catastrophic harm to America. His goddamned DC hotel alone is grounds enough. I don’t care what kompromat the Russians gave Trump to lord over you (looking at you Lindsey Graham). Man up. I spent nearly six years getting beat on by Vietnamese mad at me for bombing their families, so no sympathy here for your little sex or financial crime problems. Stand up to Trump. He’s a damned bully, like that red head Farkus kid in “A Christmas Story.” Smack Trump and he’ll run crying to the ghost of Roy Cohn. Remember, we should have stopped Hitler at Munich.
Subtlety is how our country wound up with Trump. Political actors believed voters would see as relevant oblique references to how Trump would make politics less civilized. Our leaders should have been more clear, more willing to share what they knew about Trump and Russia. But they all believed voters would get it without the cost of having to expose what and how they knew the truth about Trump. Well, 100,000 voters in 5 states did not get it, and here we are.
In the age of Trump, subtlety kills.