As he demonstrated with his speech at the 2017 Liberty Medal ceremony, in Philadelphia, Senator John McCain isn’t the type to be intimidated. Photograph by Matt Rourke / AP

During a speech he gave Monday night, in Philadelphia, where the National Constitution Center was bestowing upon him its Liberty Medal, John McCain didn’t once mention Donald Trump. He didn’t need to. The eighty-one-year-old Republican senator, who is suffering from brain cancer, began his remarks by recounting the days he shared in the Senate with Joe Biden, the former Vice-President, who had introduced him to the crowd and praised his sense of duty. Even though the two of them often differed on policy, McCain said, they “believed in each other’s patriotism and the sincerity of each other’s convictions. . . . We believed in our mutual responsibility to help make the place work and to coöperate in finding solutions to our country’s problems.”

This sounded like a stab at the current political climate in Washington, and it echoed what McCain said in July, when he helped to vote down one of the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare. But the Arizonan hadn’t travelled to Philadelphia merely to wax lyrical on the virtues of bipartisanship. “What a privilege it is to serve this big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, striving, daring, beautiful, bountiful, brave, magnificent country,” he said, alluding to his sixty years in the Navy and in Washington. “We are living in the land of the free, the land where anything is possible, the land of the immigrant’s dream . . . the land that repairs and reinvents itself, the land where a person can escape the consequences of a self-centered youth and know the satisfaction of sacrificing for an ideal, the land where you can go from aimless rebellion to a noble cause, and from the bottom of your class to your party’s nomination for President.”

In the last bit of that purple passage, McCain was presumably referring to himself. (Although it would be interesting to see Trump’s school records.) “We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn,” McCain went on. “The international order we helped build from the ashes of world war . . . has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. This wondrous land has shared its treasures and ideals and shed the blood of its finest patriots to help make another, better world. And, as we did so, we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous than the America that existed when I watched my father go off to war on December 7, 1941.”

In this potted history, historians would find things to argue with. So would the citizens of countries such as Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, and Vietnam—places where the soaring rhetoric of Pax Americana was put into practice in far from lofty ways. Still, many analysts would agree with McCain that American hegemony has helped to maintain global order, and that the United States has benefitted greatly from its role as the leading global superpower. “To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history,” McCain said.

A student of Strunk & White would have skipped more quickly to the phrase “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve them.” The term “unpatriotic” was also partially shrouded in circumlocution. And yet McCain’s message was clear. “We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil,” he continued. “We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.”

The reaction to McCain’s speech was predictable: threats from Trump and fury from some of his supporters. “Yeah, well, I hear it,” Trump told the radio host Chris Plante on Tuesday morning. “And people have to be careful because at some point I fight back. I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back, and it won’t be pretty.” Bill Mitchell, a conservative talk-show host and social-media agitator, tweeted, “#JohnMcCain comes out against Nationalism. Is there anything about this man I don’t hate?”

Of course, McCain didn’t come out against nationalism. As his speeches, voting record, and life story indicate, there are few American politicians more nationalistic than he is. But in his mind nationalism matches the dictionary definition: “loyalty and devotion to a nation.” Rather than seeking to disavow nationalism, he was clearly trying to reclaim it from those—Trump, Steve Bannon, and others—who are selling a bastardized version of the concept, one that he considers ahistorical and self-defeating.

McCain has described his medical prognosis as “very poor,” and several times in his speech he hinted that he is living with a pressing sense of his own mortality. But the question is: Having gone this far in taking a stand against Trump, how much further will McCain go? Talking to reporters on Tuesday morning, he coyly denied that his words had been targeted at the President exclusively. “I was referring to the whole atmosphere and environment,” he said. “There’s a whole lot of people besides the President who have said ‘America First.’ ” This was typical of McCain, who revels in the spotlight and often proceeds in zigzag fashion. But he has also been in Washington long enough to know how—on the heels of Senator Bob Corker calling the White House an “adult day care center”—his speech would be received as the second time in two weeks that a senior Republican has suggested that Trump, and Trumpism, is a menace to the country.

We can only hope that, at some point soon, Corker, McCain, or some other influential G.O.P. figure will summon the courage to state publicly the obvious corollary: since the President is a menace to the United States, he ought to be removed from office. So far, McCain hasn’t gone anywhere near that level. But we know that he isn’t the type to be intimidated. “It’s fine with me,” he said, when asked about Trump’s threat to “fight back.” “I’ve faced some fairly significant adversaries in the past.”