JOHN MCCAIN/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Thursday [8-30-18] morning, in images carried live on every major cable news network, the body of Senator John McCain arrived at the North Phoenix Baptist Church in a hearse with the word ‘Dignity’ on the rear window. Inside, the Republican senator was remembered, by a man who ran on a ticket against him, for a friendship that transcended political difference. Thursday night, at an Indiana campaign rally carried live on Fox News, President Trump accused his former opponent, Hillary Clinton, of ‘getting away with’ unnamed misdeeds; attacked his own Justice Department and F.B.I. for not ‘doing their job’; and taunted ‘elite’ detractors: ‘I’m president, and they’re not.’ The broadcasts were separate. But they were not unrelated. They amounted to a last argument between the senator and the president who clashed with him in life (‘I like people who weren’t captured’) and slighted him in death. They were competing programs with competing visions, not of policy, but of civic life. Mr. McCain, who died Saturday [8-25-18], had no control over the president’s itinerary. But as an omnipresent Sunday-show guest who courted reporters on his ‘Straight Talk Express’ campaign bus, he was not unaware in life of how things played on TV.”
–James Poniewozik, “One Last Time, McCain Counterprograms Trump,” The New York Times online, August 31, 2018