President Donald Trump tweeted “deepest sympathies and respect” for the family of John McCain shortly after the senator died Saturday after a battle with brain cancer. “My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!” he tweeted. Trump’s reelection campaign later released a statement that read: “All of us at the Trump Campaign offer our sincere condolences to the family of Senator John McCain following his passing this evening. We encourage all Americans to take the opportunity to remember Senator McCain and his family in their prayers on this sad occasion.” When asked for an official statement on McCain’s death, the White House referred to Trump’s tweet. Trump frequently attacked McCain and his thumbs-down vote against an Obamacare repeal – even if he stopped referring to McCain by name in recent months. Earlier this month, Trump declined to mention McCain as he signed the military funding bill that carried the Arizona Republican’s name. Trump’s attacks on McCain led the senator’s daughter Meghan McCain to say, “his comments are never going to be OK with me, especially at this moment in my life. I’m never going to forgive it.” Trump was also roundly criticized in 2015 when he said that McCain, who spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war after being shot down in North Vietnam, was not a hero because he was captured. “I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said. Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check the box if you do not wish to receive promotional offers via email from TIME. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Michael Zennie at michael.zennie@time.com.<doc-sep>A terse Donald Trump was quick to take to Twitter after Senator John McCain’s death today but the 45th President of the United States didn’t have much to say about the man who sought to be the 43rd and 44th POTUS himself. In unusual brevity and lacking his standard hyperbole, Trump wrote: My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2018 There was no mention by Trump of McCain’s military service, his unsuccessful 2000 GOP nomination bid or his 2008 standard bearing for the party. Unlike his boss, Vice-President Mike Pence at least acknowledged his fellow Republican’s career: Karen and I send our deepest condolences to Cindy and the entire McCain family on the passing of Senator John McCain. We honor his lifetime of service to this nation in our military and in public life. His family and friends will be in our prayers. God bless John McCain. — Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) August 26, 2018 A past political rival of McCain’s and one of the people who will delver a eulogy at the funeral was far more generous that the current Executive Office holders in his remembrance. Here’s what former President Barack Obama said on Saturday: Our statement on the passing of Senator John McCain: pic.twitter.com/3GBjNYxoj5 — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 26, 2018 McCain’s wife Cindy and daughter Meghan, a co-host of The View, also took to social media after the Senator’s death with some emotional words: My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the the place he loved best. — Cindy McCain (@cindymccain) August 26, 2018 In many ways, while Obama and the younger McCain’s tweets were expected, Donald Trump’s icy response to the 81-year old Arizona Senator’s death from brain cancer shouldn’t surprise anyone either. The former Apprentice host and the man played by Ed Harris in HBO’s 2012 Game Change film were never any where near close despite their party allegiance. In fact, the two often seemed to be permanently at odds politically and otherwise in life and now death. It really exploded in 2015, when, after another spat with McCain, a campaigning Trump said that the captured Navy pilot held and tortured for years by the North Vietnamese was “not a war hero.” “He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump added at the Family Leadership Summit in July 2015 soon after announcing his bid for the White House “I like people who weren’t captured.” After that, relations between the two became even more strained as Trump frequently complained publicly how McCain’s Senate vote of July 2017 was the reason the GOP were never able to completely wipe out Obamacare despite years of promising to eradicate the 44th POTUS’ biggest domestic policy achievement. More recently, after a White House aide stayed in her job for a month this year, after mocking McCain’s ill health, Trump managed to shock many and not others when he refused to say the Senator’s name as he signed the massive John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act into law in early August. At the time, McCain gave Trump a snub of his own in absence right back: I’m proud the NDAA is now law & humbled Congress chose to designate it in my name. As Chairman of the Armed Services Cmte, I’ve found high purpose in service of a cause greater than self—the cause of our troops who defend America & all that she stands for. https://t.co/Gco9E57HdC — John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) August 13, 2018 On August 24, Trump gave a wide-ranging speech in Iowa touching on almost all the Republican hot button topics. Yet, he never once noted how McCain had decided to end treatment for his aggressive brain cancer – a decision that effectively led to the now deceased Senator’s passing today. Some of the antagonism between the media sensitive Trump and McCain undoubtedly came from the admiration that the latter was held in by many in the press, even after the Senator’s disastrous 2008 White House race against Obama. A longtime favorite of op-ed writers and tv bookers for his frank and self-described “maverick” style and frequent Sunday morning talk shows, late night and cable newers slots, McCain was also no stranger to the fictionalized small and big screen over the course of his political career. Besides a recent HBO documentary on his life and being portrayed by Ed Harris is the premium cabler’s award winning 2012 Game Change film, which profiled the 2008 Presidential race and McCain’s running mate choice of Sarah Palin, played by Julianne Moore, the Arizona Senator played himself in a number of series and films. As well as appearing on Saturday Night Live on several occasions and having the 2005 TV movie Faith of My Fathers based on his book of the same name, the politician and author was on NBC’s Parks and Recreation in 2015, and Fox’s 24 in 2006, among others. In movies, McCain was most noticeabley in a church appearance in 2005’s Wedding Crashers at, no surprise, a wedding. Now the true American hero is gone.<doc-sep>
President Trump took a moment to offer condolences to the family of former Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who died on Saturday at the age of 81. My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2018 Noticeably absent from the tweet was anything about McCain himself. Trump famously criticized the former Republican presidential candidate and Vietnam prisoner of war during the 2016 presidential campaign. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said during a Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, in July 2015. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” At the time, many thought this was the moment Trump’s presidential candidacy was finished. Who can so strongly criticize a beloved national figure and former party nominee and survive? Trump repeated the sentiment in an op-ed for USA Today after his statement, saying flatly, “the reality is that John McCain the politician has made America less safe,” referring to his record of supporting foreign wars. Trump and McCain had plenty of policy disagreements — largely but not exclusively on immigration and foreign policy — and McCain famously became the deciding vote to kill legislation designed to repeal Obamacare, one of Trump’s campaign promises. As the Washington Post’s Anne Gearan and Josh Dawsey reported, resentment from Trump lasted through the final days of McCain’s life. Trump continued to tweet criticism of McCain even after the senator was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer months ago. If anything, Trump has proved that it’s not a career finisher to criticize someone many considered to be an elder statesman. In a follow-up article in the Washington Post on Sunday, Dawsey reported that Trump resisted efforts by others in the White House to say something more personal about McCain’s life and career: Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and other White House aides advocated for an official statement that gave the decorated Vietnam War POW plaudits for his military and Senate service and called him a “hero,” according to current and former White House aides, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. The original statement was drafted before McCain died Saturday, and Sanders and others edited a final version this weekend that was ready for the president, the aides said. But Trump told aides he wanted to post a brief tweet instead, and the statement praising McCain’s life was not released. And that’s exactly what Trump did.