Sen. John McCain was Donald Trump’s first head-scratching target in his bid for the White House. At a Republican presidential forum last July, then-long shot Trump dismissed McCain as “a hero because he was captured” in a Q&A with Frank Luntz, referring to McCain’s six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Pundits and much of the public assumed Trump’s White House hopes would be over before they had really begun. After all, who trashes POWs and the Republican Party’s 2008 presidential nominee in one breath and lives to tell about it?



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Eight months later, we have our answer. Trump now stands on the brink of winning the GOP nomination, while McCain is grinding through a dead-heat Senate race against Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkptrick , a three-term congresswoman and attorney.

No dynamic better embodies the internal conflict roiling the Republican Party today than the squeeze Trump is putting on McCain, the original independent and maverick of the party. On a larger scale, nobody has been a more consistent voice on American foreign policy for the GOP than McCain, whose views on conflict, diplomacy, and America’s role in the world Trump has largely rejected.

In McCain’s home state of Arizona, the latest Rocky Mountain Poll shows Kirkpatrick tied with McCain at 42 percent, with 16 percent of voters still undecided. But the same poll shows the biggest hurdle between McCain and a sixth Senate term may be the ticket he’s running on, if Trump is at the top of it: Incredibly, Trump loses the red state to Hillary Clinton by seven points, just four years after Mitt Romney won the state by eight points for Republicans.