Whatever you may think about Meghan McCain, former co-host of The View, there is always one definite thing that is very clear: She loved her dad, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain.
So when Donald Trump called her in 2017 to claim that reports of him mocking her father’s war injuries were “fake news,” she says she found the phone call “very bizarre.”
Talking to DailyMailTV, [1] McCain was on hand to promote her new memoir “Bad Republican.”
She remembers receiving a voice mail from the White House that said Trump wanted to talk to her after she condemned his comments in which he mocked her father as “abhorrent,” HuffPost [2] reports.
What more must my family be put through right now? This is abhorrent. https://t.co/xJmFdh93xL [3]
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) September 27, 2017 [4]
“I lost my mind,” McCain says. “And I called my dad and I said, ‘I don’t want to call him back. This is scary. I don’t want to talk to him.’ And my dad said, ‘You have to call him. He’s the President of the United States. It’s not an option. You still respect the office.”
That’s a nice sentiment but if there’s one thing Trump didn’t do, it’s “respect the office.”
So McCain swallowed her nerves and called Trump and thus began the “very bizarre conversation.”
Trump, she says “denied making fun of my dad’s war injuries and he didn’t apologize, but he said ‘I didn’t do this, this fake news.” Then Melania hopped on and told Meghan, ‘We love you, we love your dad,’ and I was like ‘You don’t, but okay.'”
McCain notes this may be “the only and only time” the Trumps “had some awareness of the damage their rhetoric did to the McCain family.
Writing about the phone call in her memoir, McCain notes “Trump wouldn’t change his tactics either. He would go on to talk about my father over and over again, always in derogatory ways.
“For years he made a sport out of beating the crap out of my family, and he didn’t let up once he got into the Oval Office,” she writes. “Trump had supporters boo my father at a rally. He fought the lowering of the flag in my dad’s honor when he died.”
Undoubtedly the worst thing Trump did was when he infamously insulted McCain, a former prisoner of war during a 2015 Q & A in Iowa.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said, referring to McCain. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
The former Arizona Senator lost his life in August 2018, and Trump made these nasty remarks while the man was suffering from brain cancer. I have never been a fan of John McCain, or of his daughter Meghan but Trump’s remarks and complete insensitivity were the height of cruelty. Anyone who can stoop this low when a person is dying is a pretty awful human being.
But that would be Trump. Few rational people would ever accuse him of being a hero.