Leave it to the media to resurrect the controversy between the late senator and the U.S. president as a means of bashing President Trump, whom the media detest. It is also a distraction from the stock market breaking records left and right, a new and better trade deal with Mexico, a country that the media constantly tell us hates Trump and won't do business with him, Bruce Ohr's congressional testimony, and other news the media would prefer to ignore.

With Senator John McCain's recent passing, the Trump-McCain feud has heated up. It's really a manufactured kerfuffle, as one party is saying little, and the other party has departed from the living, no longer able to participate in the feud, except posthumously via the media.



Image credit: Donkey Hotey.

Trump has been criticized over the past four days for his response to Senator McCain's passing. He wasn't personal enough, they say, even though the president appropriately tweeted, "My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!"

Then the media fussed and pouted over how long the flag over the White House should be flown at half-mast. The flag flew that way appropriately after McCain's death, but the time period wasn't enough. CNN probably wants it at half-mast permanently until Trump is out of office, although another six and a half more years at half-mast might be a bit excessive.

The reality is that the flag was handled as it should have been, based on a 1954 proclamation by then President Eisenhower.

As McCain was a U.S. senator, the proclamation instructs that flags be lowered on the day of his death and the day after. McCain passed away on Saturday, and the White House reportedly raised the flags back right around midnight overnight as Sunday ended, which would be the minimum amount of time as outlined by Eisenhower's proclamation.

The media think they knows better, as this tweet exemplifies.

Next is the funeral. Trump is being criticized for not attending, despite McCain's request that he not attend. Somehow, to MSNBC, honoring the request of the recently departed is crass. How would they react if Trump showed up anyway, making the funeral about himself, rather than the senator, as Barack Obama might have done?

Resurrected is the feud from a few years ago. Watch cable news, and the feud is all Trump's fault. McCain remains blameless in life and even after death. Let's take a look at how the feud started.

Reported in The New Yorker on July 16, 2015, a few days after a Trump campaign rally held in Phoenix, in McCain's home state, McCain offered his displeasure over the rally. "It's very bad," he said. Going farther, "[t]his performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me," McCain said. "Because what he did was he fired up the crazies."

This rally was held on Saturday, July 11, 2015, as reported by Politico. The dates are important.

Trump-supporters are "crazies," according to Senator McCain, those people willing to stand in line for hours to see and hear their favored candidate for president. I wonder if McCain ever had such crowds at his campaign rallies in 2000 or 2008, at least before he brought Sarah Palin onto his ticket.

Insulting Trump-supporters is the same as insulting Trump, at least in Trump's view. As he is hardwired to do, when insulted, he hits back.

In Iowa, a week later, on July 18, 2015, Trump was interviewed and delivered his response to McCain's calling Trump-supporters, and, by default, Trump himself, "crazy." Trump said, "He's not a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

The feud was off and running, but who started it? From the dates, McCain drew first blood, and Trump responded as he always does: with a right cross.

Yet to the media, this feud is totally one-sided. McCain is the innocent party, just minding his own business, when that bully Donald Trump comes up out of nowhere and punches him in the nose. In reality, it was Trump minding his own business, trying to run a winning campaign, something McCain found challenging, when McCain called him and his supporters "crazy."

This was much like Hillary Clinton's descriptor "deplorables" to characterize those who chose the current president over her.

Even Rush Limbaugh, who describes himself as right 99-plus percent of the time, got this wrong. On his show this week, he remarked about the feud:

We're all human, right? Some might disagree with that, but we're all human, in the general sense. So you're Senator McCain and you're out there minding your own business, you're in advanced years and all of a sudden this orange headed guy walks down an escalator in New York and runs for president, says what he says, and you're McCain, and you've got this reputation here for probity and seriousness and respect and all that kind of stuff. And then shortly after the orange headed guy walks down the escalator, somebody asks him about McCain, and the orange headed guy says, "I don't have any respect for people in the military that get captured. I don't think they're heroes," what do you expect McCain's reaction to that to be?

Even El Rushbo missed the fact that McCain hit first by calling Trump-supporters "crazies" and that Trump responded in Trumpian fashion with a quick punch.

Let the media huff and puff. This is their bright, shiny object of the week to chase around the room. They quickly lost interest in Omarosa, Cohen, and Manafort, all shiny objects for a few days earlier this month within the media echo chamber. Now it's McCain as the shiny object, the same guy they called a racist when he ran for president in 2008, now revered as Mother Teresa in death.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if the media did an honest assessment of John McCain's life, his dealings with some bad players in the Middle East, his charitable foundation and its Clinton Foundation-like donors, and his role in the Russian collusion hoax? Although inconvenient, we might discover the many inconvenient similarities between McCain and the Clintons.

Instead, the media will bray about the half-mast flag and funeral guest list, since their minds run only in a single gear: destroy Trump.

Brian C Joondeph, M.D., MPS, a Denver-based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.