For many, it was a historic opportunity to memorialize the life of a Senate titan. For President Trump, it was Saturday.
WASHINGTON — For the clusters of onlookers, besuited power players and three former presidents who had all traveled to Washington National Cathedral, the muggy day was a historic opportunity to memorialize the life of Senator John McCain, who was remembered as a deeply patriotic war hero, a former Republican presidential candidate and a scrappy, humanly flawed, ultimately idealistic lawmaker.
For President Trump, it was Saturday.
In the many discussions about how to mark his life that Mr. McCain had with his staff and family before he died, he had made clear he did not want Mr. Trump to participate in anything they planned. So as Mr. McCain was eulogized in the presence of much of the American political establishment, Mr. Trump, pointedly uninvited, engaged in what by now is a familiar weekend routine. He sent a series of angry tweets aimed at some political adversaries, then left the White House to play a round of golf at his resort in Virginia.
“This is the scandal here — a police state,” the president wrote, quoting a conservative commentator about a purported conspiracy to spy on Mr. Trump, as Mr. McCain’s coffin was carried into the cathedral.
He dredged up the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia and complained about it. In a series of tweets, he argued that “the DOJ and FBI are completely out to lunch.”
And some of the president’s supporters, aware of four days of funeral proceedings but seemingly emboldened by Mr. Trump’s approach, chimed in with their own criticisms of how people were honoring Mr. McCain.
“@realDonaldTrump ran for @POTUS ONE time and WON,” Katrina Pierson, an adviser on Mr. Trump’s campaign, tweeted. “Some people will never recover from that.”
Throughout the morning, the three-mile distance between the White House and the cathedral, the traditional place for Washington’s most somber gatherings, demarcated a political chasm that Mr. Trump did not cross.
While Mr. McCain’s closest friends insisted that the senator did not harbor a personal grudge toward the president, Mr. Trump’s opinion of Mr. McCain has been more explicit. In recent months, as Mr. McCain was dying of cancer, the president’s references were often barbed, and at his political rallies he would mimic the thumbs-down signal the senator had made when he voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act.
When he recently signed a defense bill named in the senator’s honor, the president refused to utter his name. Nor did Mr. Trump join leaders from both parties last Friday in sending sympathy to Mr. McCain and his family after it was announced that he was stopping treatment for his cancer. He died a day later.
But while he was urged by his aides to behave in a more unifying manner after the White House was criticized for initially flying the American flag only briefly at half-staff in Mr. McCain’s honor, the president made it clear on Saturday that he had no intention of letting his former adversary — whose carefully stage-managed plans played out as his own subtle rebuke of the president — have all the attention.
As journalists lined up on the lawn at the cathedral — members of a group Mr. McCain used to jokingly call “my base” — Mr. Trump tweeted out his well-known disdain for the news media. Mr. Trump cited Alan Dershowitz, the emeritus Harvard Law School professor, saying that “news reporting has become part of the adversary system.”
Mr. Trump added: “It has become tainted and corrupt!”
Throughout the week, the president declined to comment on any of the public events marking Mr. McCain’s death, and he said publicly that he thought he had done enough to honor the Arizona senator. Advisers said he was not willing to cancel any of his plans — including a raucous rally in Indiana held on Thursday, just as Mr. McCain’s coffin was being transported to Washington.
The only change in plans he made was canceling a weekend visit to Camp David in the Maryland mountains, which would have put him even farther from Mr. McCain’s funeral. Instead, upstaged by a senator whose final acts were defined by his calls for bipartisan unity amid a climate of coarsening politics, Mr. Trump stayed in Washington and spent the first day of a holiday weekend saying and doing what he usually does.
Not all the members of the Trump administration followed his lead. Several took a more somber approach as they mingled with the grieving inhabitants of official Washington. Earlier in the morning, as Cindy McCain, Mr. McCain’s widow, stood in front of a wreath honoring her husband at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis somberly stood by her side.
Most notably, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, along with John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, entered the cathedral just as the hearse carrying Mr. McCain arrived. As the church’s bells played a rendition of “America the Beautiful,” Mr. Trump shared a favorable review of his administration on Twitter.
Ms. Trump was asked to attend earlier in the week by Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of Mr. McCain’s who had cleared his invitation with the senator’s widow, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Graham invited Ms. Trump after she expressed her condolences to him during a meeting on Capitol Hill this week.
Her father continued to tweet during the service, switching his focus to Canada and the North American Free Trade Agreement, threatening to exclude Canada from a final deal and insisting that he saw no political need to accommodate the Canadians. Mr. Trump also warned Congress, which has final say over trade deals, not to interfere and said that he would be happy to just terminate Nafta altogether. It remains a matter of debate as to whether Mr. Trump has the authority to do that on his own.
As Mr. Trump tweeted, onlookers outside the cathedral lined up along the streets, and pointed through the wrought-iron fences. They identified the politicians streaming in, lifting their children on their shoulders for a better look. And several took note of a difference they saw between Mr. Trump’s unpredictable approach to politics and the senator who stayed steadfast to his ideals.
