Having earned, and then lost, his reputation as one of the Republican Party’s less partisan lawmakers, Arizona Senator John McCain is making a late play for maverick-dom in the twilight of his career. With his sixth and final term ending in 2022, a recent cancer diagnosis, and no re-election to worry about, the frequently sarcastic senator hasn’t pulled his punches in recent months, pushing for an aggressive investigation into allegations of Russian election meddling and unexpectedly derailing Senator Mitch McConnell’s health-care agenda in July when his fellow Republicans tried to repeal Obamacare without offering a replacement. But the Vietnam War veteran has saved his most acerbic barbs for Donald Trump, who once belittled McCain’s service by arguing that he’s “not a war hero . . . because he was captured.” On Thursday, he tore into the president once again, publishing a blistering op-ed in The Washington Post calling on Congress and the American people to set aside their differences and focus on shared values.

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It was, in other words, a fierce repudiation of Trump.

“Americans recoiled from the repugnant spectacle of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville to promote their un-American ‘blood and soil’ ideology. There is nothing in their hate-driven racism that can match the strength of a nation conceived in liberty and comprising 323 million souls of different origins and opinions who are equal under the law,” McCain wrote, referring to the hate groups that Trump defended last month as including some “very fine people” on “many sides.” He criticized Congress for sabotaging itself as it “lurch[es] from one self-created crisis to another,” and blasted the zero-sum political battles playing out in congress, noting that they were leading to a situation where “majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important.” A bicameral Congress, he added, “requires pragmatic problem-solving from even the most passionate partisans. It relies on compromise between opposing sides to protect the interests we share. We can fight like hell for our ideas to prevail. But we have to respect each other or at least respect the fact that we need each other.”

Most of all, he blamed the dysfunction on the titular head of the Republican Party, Donald Trump. The importance of bipartisanship “has never been truer than today,” McCain wrote, “when Congress must govern with a president who has no experience of public office, is often poorly informed and can be impulsive in his speech and conduct.”

McCain continued:

We must respect his authority and constitutional responsibilities. We must, where we can, cooperate with him. But we are not his subordinates. We don’t answer to him. We answer to the American people.

Across the Internet, McCain was alternately hailed as a hero or a turncoat. So far, Trump has not responded on Twitter. Perhaps he thought it better not to prove the op-ed’s point.