Donald Trump deepens long-running ‘blood feud’ with John McCain’s family

Donald Trump‘s latest attack on the family of his longtime nemesis has only deepened the long-running “blood feud” between them.

Donald Trump‘s latest attack on the family of former US senator John McCain has only deepened the long-running “blood feud” between them, according to Mr McCain’s daughter, TV personality Meghan McCain.

In a mocking statement via his spokeswoman Liz Harrington, the former president called Meghan McCain a “low-life” and a “bully” after she referred to his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner as “funeral crashers” in her book Bad Republican.

“They should never have come [to my father’s 2018 funeral],” Ms McCain said during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.

“They had no business being there. I remember seeing them, and seeing her specifically. They had no goddamn business being there and it’s something that still angers me, clearly.”

Retaliating to Ms McCain’s comments, Mr Trump said: “Isn’t it funny that Meghan McCain, who has always been a bully and basically a low-life, is now complaining that it was she who was bullied by the Slobs and Radical Left maniacs of The View.”

Ms McCain was previously a co-host on The View.

“At the request of many of her representatives, I made it possible for her father to have the world’s longest funeral, designed and orchestrated by him, even though I was never, to put it mildly, a fan,” he added.

Thanks for the publicity boomer.

My new @audible_com memoir #BadRepublican is out now:https://t.co/X2Bzvbr63fhttps://t.co/wCDR9lVafc

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) October 22, 2021

But asked by Fox News’ Howard Kurtz for her response to Mr Trump’s latest insults, Ms McCain, who quit her four-season run on The View in July, simply responded by telling him “thanks for the publicity”.

“He really has a way of helping people get publicity for their books. I think this [is] part of what my memoir is about. It’s about being a bad Republican at The View, when just being a Republican in general means you’re the villain at The View, and then it means me being a bad Republican in the Republican Party right now because I’m not a Trump supporter,” she said.

“My family and him have a blood feud at this point. It’s about what conservatism looks like post-Trump, which I think is something Republicans will have to take a hard look at one way or another, even if he ends up running in 2024.”

Asked whether his statement hurt at all, Ms McCain said she’d become accustomed to his attacks on her father — routinely carried out before and after his death from brain cancer.

Donald Trump‘s latest attack on the family of John McCain has only deepened the long-running “blood feud” between them. Picture: Olivier Douliery/AFP

John McCain with his daughter, Meghan, on The View.

So tense was the relationship between Mr Trump and the late Arizona Senator, that Mr McCain did not wish for the then-president to attend his funeral.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Mr Trump disparaged Mr McCain, declaring he was “not a war hero” despite serving — and being captured and tortured — during the Vietnam War.

“He’s not a war hero,” Mr Trump said of Mr McCain in 2015.

“He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Mr McCain, who was captured during the war, refused an early release from imprisonment due to his family ties because he did not wish to leave before his fellow captives.

Mr Trump also referred to Mr McCain’s stance on immigration as “weak”, labelling him an “incompetent politician”. He has repeatedly declared he “was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be”.

Mr McCain was the Republican nominee for president in 2008. He lost to Barack Obama.

Cindy McCain, her son James, and daughter Meghan at John McCain’s funeral. Picture: Drew Angerer/Getty Images/AFP

Mr Trump’s constant attacks on Mr McCain — and Cindy McCain’s fury at his “denigration” of her husband — are thought to have contributed to him losing the state of Arizona to Joe Biden in last year’s presidential election.

“I listened to him denigrate my husband, and then denigrate my husband again while (John) was on his deathbed,” Mrs McCain said during a Republican Veterans for Biden-Harris panel.

“And John kept telling me, he said, ‘Don’t. It’s just politics. Don’t react to it.’ And I didn’t.”

But Mrs McCain was particularly outraged by reports that Mr Trump referred to American soldiers who had died in service to their country as “suckers” and “losers” (something the former president vociferously denies).

“You know, I’m the mother of two veterans and a wife of a veteran, and my father was a veteran. They were not losers and suckers by any chance,” she told 60 Minutes.

“It angered me a great deal. It angered me. And so I thought, you know, I can either sit here and be angry or I can do something.”

Mr Biden has been a longtime friend of the McCain family, bonding not only as the parents of children who have served in the military, but also over glioblastoma – the aggressive brain cancer that killed Mr Biden’s son Beau three years before Mr McCain succumbed to the same disease.

“Now more than ever,” Ms McCain said in the Biden campaign’s first TV ad, “we need a president who puts service before self”.