Meghan McCain let it slide after Donald Trump disparaged her father, the late Arizona senator John McCain, because he sent her a very “gracious” message, she revealed.
The former co-host of The View, who now hosts her own podcast, Citizen McCain, told the story for the first time while speaking with the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
“When our good, dear friend Tulsi Gabbard was being confirmed in the White House, she asked me to come to the White House with her, because it was actually done in the Oval Office,” she began. But McCain wasn’t on good terms with the president at the time.
“There were conversations behind the scenes of whether or not it would be appropriate for me to come, whether or not President Trump would be OK with me coming,” she added.
To her surprise, after receiving special “permission” from Trump himself to attend, “he relayed the kindest message,” which she said was along the lines of, “Of course, this is my home, but you are welcome in it.”
After her visit, McCain said he “sent a private message I don’t want to reveal because it’s private to me and my husband” that was “very kind and very nice.” So much so, McCain said, that she was willing to let bygones be bygones.
“I was like, of all the things that have gone on, of all the things that have been said and done, this is very gracious,” she said.
Her comments come after Trump bitterly feuded with John McCain in the last years of the latter’s life. In 2015, Trump said McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and a half years, was “not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
Trump also called McCain a “loser” and continued to berate him even after the senator was diagnosed with brain cancer. He also had more to say following McCain’s death in 2018, falsely claiming in 2019 that McCain had finished “last in his class” and that he was “never a fan” of his and “never will be.”
It’s all water under the bridge for his daughter now, Meghan McCain said Wednesday, after the exchanges she had with Trump last year, which she said showed the “much softer side to President Trump” that she attributes to the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt in 2024.
“The second President Trump term, I much prefer it. I really like the tone of President Trump this go-around for all of the personal reasons everyone can already surmise,” she said.
The president’s rhetoric during his second term includes his threats to the people of Iran earlier this month, when he posted to social media that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
