John McCain’s Secret Daughter Vows To Torch His Memory If Kamala Harris Doesn’t Stop Saying Nice Things About Him

She might need to get out more.

Democrats have memorialized John McCain as an American hero, a true patriot who put country over party. Meghan McCain hates that.

Meghan McCain, who you might have heard is the late senator’s daughter, resents how Democrats, especially Vice President Kamala Harris, go around saying nice things about her father, who was John McCain. She won’t tolerate anyone suggesting that if her father, John McCain, were alive today, he might actually join that other father/daughter duo Dick and Liz Cheney as Republican Never Trumpers who’ve endorsed Harris as the only logical way to prevent a second Trump term.

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Least Surprising News Ever: Meghan McCain, Kyrsten Sinema True Besties

McCain posted Friday on social media:

Now, I know democrats want to reinvent history and turn my Dad into any illusion you guys need him to be depending on the political moment you need to bastardize his memory for…

But please don’t make me start sharing what I remember him ACTUALLY saying about Kamala Harris….

Democrats have not “bastardized” John McCain’s memory — quite the opposite. They selectively focus on his one good deed in a weary career. Harris often speaks about how the “late great John McCain” cast the surprise vote that saved the Affordable Care Act and prevented millions of Americans from losing their health insurance. On the campaign trail, she’s re-enacted McCain’s famous thumb’s-down. She describes the moment as something out of a movie, and it was: The man who Barack Obama defeated in 2008 personally saved his signature legislation. (Watch below.)

John McCain had his Trumpy moments

Meghan McCain has threatened to “spill tea” if Kamala Harris continues culturally appropriating her father’s memory. It’s a desperate, hollow threat. Harris joined the Senate in January 2017. John McCain was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in July 2017 and died in August 2018. It seems unlikely that he would’ve worked that closely with Harris to develop an informed opinion.

It’s certainly possible that he didn’t like her. Their parties were in direct conflict during a hyper-partisan time, and Harris was a newcomer to a Senate that still operated like a restricted country club. McCain voted to confirm his former colleague Jeff Session as attorney general, and Harris repeatedly dragged the living Confederate monument over the coals during Senate hearings.

In June 2017, Harris pressed Sessions about his refusal to answer questions regarding possible conversations he’d had with Donald Trump about the Russia investigation.

“Sir, I am not asking about you the principle,” she said. “I am asking — when you knew that you would be asked these questions and you would rely on that policy, did you not ask your staff to show you the policy that would be the basis for your refusing.”

McCain interrupted Harris at this point, talking over her to say, “Chairman, the witness should be allowed to answer the question.”

This received a lot of press at the time. Republicans didn’t like that Harris asked Sessions uncomfortable questions, and even non-MAGA GOP senators thought the first-term senator was using the hearings to advance her political career. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that McCain bad-mouthed Harris in private. He had a history of making racist and misogynistic remarks that rank up there with Trump’s offensive rhetoric.

During his 2000 presidential campaign, McCain refused to apologize for using a racial slur to describe the North Vietnamese prison guards who captured and tortured him during the war.

“I hate the gooks,” McCain told reporters. “I will hate them as long as I live.”

This is an obviously racist sentiment. The men who tortured McCain were monsters but they aren’t all Vietnamese people. McCain would not have appreciated Rep. John Lewis using a racial slur to refer to the white people who almost beat him to death.

However, there’s zero justification for McCain’s misogyny. He reportedly told this horrific “joke” to an audience during his 1986 Senate campaign:

“Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die?” McCain said. “When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, ‘Where is that marvelous ape?’”

In his book The Real McCain, Cliff Schecter describes a 1992 campaign stop where Cindy McCain joined her husband. With reporters and campaign aides present, Cindy touched McCain’s head and observed, “You're getting a little thin up there.” (She was flattering him. That combover had been present for a while.) McCain snapped, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” (I use the gendered slur for the full impact, as I think the media should when reporting that Trump called Harris “retarded” at a private donor event.)

McCain once again behaved like he was at an open mic night at a 1998 Arizona fundraising dinner. “Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly?” he asked the crowd. “Because Janet Reno is her father.”

The Washington Post refused to report the actual joke, claiming it was “too vile to repeat,” and simply recounted that he’d apologized to Bill Clinton (but not to Chelsea, Hillary, or Janet Reno).

When McCain briefly took a polling lead in Florida that was attributed to Democratic defections from “your prototypical Hillary Clinton supporters,” journalist Leslie Savan wrote in an op-ed, “McCain’s sexist comments and opposition to women’s rights should dissuade Hillary Clinton supporters from voting for him.” Sound familiar? There’s some irony around the fact that Trump’s remarks on the Access Hollywood tape is what finally proved too much for McCain.

Democrats prefer to remember a better McCain

John McCain might’ve personally opposed Donald Trump, but he dutifully advanced his agenda. FiveThirtyEight calculated his “Trump score” — how often he voted in line with Trump’s positions — at 83 percent, which was 20 points greater than the “predicted score” (how often you’d expect a representative from the purplish state to back Trump).

McCain voted along with Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court justice nominees, which allowed Trump to pack the court with far-right radicals. Instead of conservatives like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy who respected precedent and defended abortion rights, we got ideologues who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.

During his last Senate race in 2016, McCain campaigned on “repealing and replacing” the Affordable Care Act, a standard Republican mantra. He agreed that the health care system was broken, but he didn’t think government intervention could fix it, another common Republican mantra. The official account is that McCain voted against Trump’s jacklegged health care bill because of how Republicans passed it. They skipped committee consideration and rejected input from Democrats. So, he stood atwart history and yelled “stop!” — much like how one-term Arizona Senate wonder Kyrsten Sinema refused to change Senate traditions to pass legislation protecting voting and abortion rights. At least, that’s probably what she tells herself. Of course, McCain’s defiance of his party kept people alive. So that’s a difference.

JD Vance has said that McCain would never have voted for Kamala Harris. (Although MAGA insists dead people frequently vote for Democrats.) We do know that McCain refused to vote for Trump (he wrote in a name) and that was before he was a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who tried to overturn a presidential election. McCain’s fellow Arizona conservative Jeff Flake has endorsed the non-felonious Harris.

Never Trump conservative Bill Kristol said the vision offered at the 2024 Democratic National Convention was “kind of Bill Clinton (with a touch of Jack Kemp) at home, and John McCain abroad, with a hefty dose of John F. Kennedy-Ronald Reagan patriotism throughout. Harris even offered a striking endorsement of American exceptionalism.”

Vance is an America-first isolationist who would abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. If Vance considers Liz Cheney a neoliberal warmonger, then the smear equally applies to McCain, who famously accused Republican Rand Paul of serving Putin. McCain was a major supporter of NATO, which Trump loathes.

Unlike Trump’s GOP, McCain was known for his cordial relationships with Democrats, including the late Sen. Joe Lieberman, who supported his 2008 presidential campaign. Steve Schimidt revealed that McCain seriously considered asking Lieberman, the former Democratic VP nominee, to reprise his role on McCain’s ticket. Lieberman was a pro-choice centrist but hawkish on foreign policy, their chief area of agreement. Again, it’s not out of the question that McCain, if he were alive, would publicly endorse the non-treason ticket.

Far from “bastardizing” McCain’s memory, Harris and Democrats actively promote an idealized image of McCain, the war hero and independent maverick, a reformer who worked across the aisle. It’s a “beguiling vision” as The Guardian’s Paul Harris described when warning moderate voters about McCain’s candidacy in 2008. Democrats talk about the ACA repeal vote, not the lobbying controversies or his “secret reputation as a man with a ferocious, unpredictable temper … who has a knack for pursuing vendettas against those he thinks have slighted him, even if they are lowly aides.”

John McCain’s son, Jimmy, endorsed Harris in September. Meghan McCain won’t go so far as to endorse Trump (yet), but maybe she thinks she can generate an anti-Harris news cycle if she reveals that her father, John McCain, said something harsh or even “too vile to repeat” about Harris. That would certainly taint his legacy, but no more so than Meghan McCain does every day