2001 SNOWBOUND, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Among the many matters on which congressional Republicans have failed to press President Donald Trump, a joke told by a communications aide may not rank particularly high, but it should have been among the easiest to address. This joke came during a White House meeting, after Senator John McCain announced that he could not vote for Gina Haspel, Trump’s nominee for C.I.A. director, because, at her hearing, she would not concede that the agency’s past practice of torture was immoral. “It doesn’t matter,” the aide said. “He’s dying anyway.” Instead of apologizing, the White House launched a hunt for the person who had leaked the remark. Some Republicans expressed outrage, but when G.O.P. senators attended a private lunch with Trump, on Tuesday, the incident wasn’t even mentioned. Erin Burnett, of CNN, asked Mike Rounds, of South Dakota, whether the senators had been “intimidated.” Not at all, he said. They just “ran out of time.”

The dispute comes at a moment when McCain is grappling, publicly and poignantly, with what it means to come up against the limits of time in the Trump era. He is eighty-one and in a decisive battle with brain cancer, as he acknowledges frankly in a new book, “The Restless Wave,” written with Mark Salter, and in an HBO documentary, “John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls.” (It will air on Memorial Day.) The worst part of the aide’s remark was the suggestion that it wasn’t only McCain’s vote that doesn’t matter but also his voice—that his legacy would dissipate. And the comment was made in the context of a fight that, for McCain, is closely tied to that legacy.

McCain, a Navy pilot, was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. He ejected from his plane, breaking both of his arms and a leg, and the North Vietnamese took him prisoner. After several months, an interrogator began pressuring him to accept a chance to go home, ahead of other Americans—his father was a high-ranking admiral. McCain later recalled that the third and final time he refused, the interrogator broke a pen that he was holding “in two,” as if to say that nothing more would be written in the book of McCain’s life. McCain was detained for almost five more years, and was systematically tortured until he signed a confession saying that he was a war criminal.

Yet that snapping of the pen marked the juncture at which McCain became someone about whom Secretary of Defense James Mattis could say—as he did last week, in an implicit reproach of his boss—“Everything I love about America is resident in this man.” McCain, in his new book, says that he knows that torture can break people, and make them say anything—even tell lies, producing bad intelligence—and that it can rob a person of everything except “the belief that were the positions reversed you wouldn’t treat them as they have treated you.” The decision of George W. Bush’s Administration to engage in torture in the years following 9/11 shook and angered McCain because it threatened his sense of the nation’s moral identity, and he worked hard for the repudiation of the practice. It was the companion to his efforts, with Senator John Kerry, to bring about some reconciliation with Vietnam.

Trump has now embraced the idea of torture, declaring, “I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” That view, coupled with the Senate’s confirmation of Haspel last week, is not only a loss for McCain but a measure of the larger distortions of the Trump Presidency. McCain himself has not been entirely immune to these distortions. He endorsed Trump in the 2016 campaign, even though Trump had said of him, “I like people who weren’t captured,” and even though Trump’s birtherism and his call for a Muslim ban were a renunciation of the finest moment in McCain’s 2008 Presidential campaign. At a town hall, when a supporter told him that she didn’t trust Barack Obama because he was “an Arab,” McCain interrupted her, saying, “He’s a decent, family-man citizen.” (The same year, in an attempt to capture, rather than to counter, the bitter strain of populism in his party, he named as his running mate Sarah Palin, who proved only to be an advance woman for Trump.) McCain finally withdrew his support for Trump after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. (“I have daughters,” he said.) He also cited Trump’s vilification of the Central Park Five. By then, however, just a month remained before the election.

McCain doesn’t really come to terms with that series of decisions in his book, although he does distance himself from many of Trump’s policies, and from his mind-set. He defends the Dreamers, and says of Trump’s “lack of empathy” for refugees, “The way he speaks about them is appalling.” He recalls, with relish, flying back to Washington last July, soon after undergoing surgery, to cast a vote that prevented his party from jettisoning the Affordable Care Act without providing a replacement: “Reporters pressed me for my decision, and I offered a smartass remark, ‘Wait for the show.’ ”

McCain is now at his home in Cornville, Arizona, where he has been visited by a stream of friends and colleagues. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said that he “didn’t want to miss the opportunity to tell him how much his friendship meant to me.” Former Vice-President Joe Biden, a friend since the early nineteen-seventies, told the Times, “John knows he’s in a very, very, very precarious situation, and yet he’s still concerned about the state of the country.” Others told reporters that McCain was planning his funeral, and did not want Trump to attend. That prompted Senator Orrin Hatch to remark that excluding Trump would be “ridiculous,” because he is the President and “a very good man”—a comment that mostly served to demonstrate the extent to which the G.O.P. has come to accept Trump as its leader. (Hatch apologized after being rebuked by McCain’s daughter Meghan.)

And McCain had a visit from Jeff Flake, the junior senator from Arizona, who last October denounced Trump from the Senate floor in impassioned terms, while also announcing that he would be quitting politics. Afterward, McCain praised Flake for his willingness to pay a “political price” for his beliefs. Perhaps the best lesson that McCain still has to offer, though, is how not to say goodbye—how not to take the easy exit. He is the embodiment of certain non-Trumpian Republican ideals. But those ideals cannot be realized in the abstract, away from the voting booths. The disgraced former sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom Trump has pardoned, calling him a “great American patriot,” is running for Flake’s seat. The next Presidential election is in two years. Time is running out. ♦