Meghan McCain, the eldest daughter of Senator John McCain, has criticized President Donald Trump at the funeral of her father – that too, without naming the President. McCain, a decorated war hero, died on August 25 after losing a battle to brain cancer. He was 81.
During the 2016 Republican primaries, McCain said he had serious concerns about Trump’s “uninformed and indeed dangerous statements on national security issues”. Relations between the two had been fraught since early in the Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016, when McCain referred to a room full of Trump supporters as “crazies”.
Trump then said of McCain: “He insulted me, and he insulted everyone in that room… He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured… perhaps he was a war hero, but right now he’s said a lot of very bad things about a lot of people.”
Following Trump becoming the presumptive nominee of the party on May 3, McCain said that Republican voters had spoken and he would support Trump. But the late senator reportedly requested before he died that Trump not be invited to the funeral.
While praising her father’s life, Meghan said: “The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege.”
She told a packed audience at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on Saturday that nobody has to “Make America Great Again”, and that “America was always great.”
“America does not boast because she does not have need to. The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great,” Meghan said to much applause.
She added: “The America of John McCain is the America of the boys who rushed the colors in every war across three centuries knowing that in them is the life of the republic.”
Three former presidents—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—many members of Congress, world leaders, and McCain’s family and friends gathered at the funeral in northwest Washington, DC, on Saturday. Obama and Bush are also scheduled to speak at the funeral.
McCain is set to be buried Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland, next to his longtime Naval Academy friend Chuck Larson.
