There’s rather a buzz in the political world around Trump’s visit to Japan and the fact that the USS John McCain was also present, as WaPo reports:
The White House asked Navy officials to obscure the USS John S. McCain while President Trump was visiting Japan, Pentagon and White House officials said Wednesday night.
A senior Navy official confirmed he was aware someone at the White House sent a message to service officials in the Pacific requesting that the USS John McCain be kept out of the picture while the president was there. That led to photographs taken Friday of a tarp obscuring the McCain name, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
When senior Navy officials grasped what was happening, they directed Navy personnel who were present to stop, the senior official said. The tarp was removed on Saturday, before Trump’s visit, he added.
In case my reader is not keeping up with President Trump’s strange behaviors, CNN helpfully adds this:
But the emails underscore Trump’s extraordinary and bitter personal feud with McCain, with whom he frequently sparred when the Arizona Republican was alive and even after he passed away from brain cancer in August.
Steve Benen on Maddowblog is not quite sure what to make of this episode, as we can see from his post’s title:
Has Trump’s contempt for John McCain reached a new, farcical level?
His conclusion seems almost helpless:
But let’s consider a charitable scenario. Let’s say White House officials pressed the military to move the USS McCain “out of sight” ahead of Trump’s trip, but the president himself was not aware of the request and played no part in the instructions.
By this reasoning, Trump’s own staff believes he’s such a delicate snowflake that they went to considerable lengths to ensure their boss wouldn’t even see the name “John McCain.”
I think it’s worth entertaining an alternative explanation, though. I see these extraordinary, post-mortem attacks on Senator McCain to be emblematic of a battle between two morality systems. Briefly, morality systems generate from sectors of society in order to facilitate the attainment of the aims of that sector. They ordain goals and methodologies to optimize those goals within that societal context.
So, as long time readers know[1], the importation of one sector’s methods into another’s leads to sub-optimal results, and this includes the governing morality system. In this particular case, Trump embodies a version of the private sector’s morality system of accumulation at all costs, an extreme and, in my view, fallacious version of the morality system governing the private sector’s actors. Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate; truth and honor play no part in Trump’s version of private sector morality.
McCain is, of course, emblematic of traditional public (or governmental) sector morality: extraordinary military service[2], then on to service in Congress; his obsession with honor and integrity when involved in a scandal. His goals, to judge from his behaviors, were not those of Trump, even if he did marry into money. He was a creature of the public sector in the end, sworn to service.
Trump and his morality system are now pushing into the public sector, and whether or not Trump realizes it, and I think he does, his morality system must vanquish the previous morality system if he is to survive and continue to pursue his natal morality system’s goals. McCain, the closest thing to a tangible face for the opposing morality system must therefore be destroyed: his most precious possession, his honor, ruined.
And therefore the continued denigration of the McCain name. If this alternative view is true, then it’s quite likely that Trump or a close associate arranged this entire little set-piece, including the publicity. If the military had caved, so much the better, but all that really needed to happen was the publicity, the Administration’s disdain for a war hero and exemplary member of the public sector. It’s part of the continued war on a morality system that is both alien and inimical to President Trump’s pathological need for riches, admiration, and join the elites.
1 For new readers, the very brief summary of the prior link is that society may be validly divided into categories or sectors, such as medical, private, governmental, etc; that such sectors are differentiated by their goals, such as improving health for medical; that the processes employed by the sectors are optimized for that sector’s goals; and that importation of processes from one sector to another are, in all likelihood, an ill-advised proposition
2 If not without its warts, from which he apparently learned. Redemption is one of the greatest American traditions.
