US Senator John McCain says he hopes to back in Washington soon, despite being diagnosed with brain cancer.
The former Republican Presidential candidate who lost the race to the White House against Barack Obama in 2008 has been prominent thorn in President Donald Trump's side.
Our Washington Correspondent Simon Marks reports.
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They don't seem to make Republicans like John McCain any more.
He's a throwback to an era in Washington that now seems positively antediluvian….an era in which Democrats and Republican committed to finding common ground in a bid to serve the public good.
That doesn't happen at all in the Trump era….and even though he's a Republican, John McCain has been bitterly critical of the man in the Oval Office and the investigations into his ties with Russia.
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So the news that Senator McCain, a fixture in Washington since he arrived here in 1986, has been diagnosed with brain cancer has devastated his political allies, like South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham.
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But it's also deeply affected Democrats.
Nancy Pelosi leads them in the House of Representatives.
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The Senator is now undergoing radiation therapy in his home state of Arizona before - he insists - he'll return to Washington and get back to work.
Dr. Joseph Zabromski is a neuro surgeon in Phoenix.
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When Senator McCain returns to the Senate, he is likely to continue pitching himself as the Republican opposition to President Trump.
The President has expressed his desire for the Senator's full recovery…but that's not entirely credible, given what Donald Trump used to say about John McCain on the campaign trail.
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But he is a war hero….he spent more than two years in the so-called Hanoi Hilton death camp during the Vietnam War….a conflict that also saw him facing death on numerous occasions as a Navy pilot.
Donald Trump, by contrast, never served a day in the US military.
A White House spokeswoman could only say that she was "not sure" whether Preisdent Trump now regrets dragging the Senator's name through the mud.