Politics is a blood sport, not at all for the faint of heart, and often families get dragged into the muck along with candidates despite anybody’s best intentions. It happens. It’s the nature of the beast. But surely there’s a point at which the nastiness can be dropped, right? Like after the politician passes away, perhaps their family can get some peace?
Well, perhaps not in 2019, when a couple of the more polarizing figures in American politics have brought out the worst in some folks.
Seven months after Senator John McCain’s passing, President Trump decided to take a swipe at him on Twitter.
According to Rolling Stone , the president was triggered by a Fox News interview with former independent counsel Ken Starr, who said it would be “a very dark stain” against McCain if he had leaked memos from the Christopher Steel Russia dossier.
Trump’s tweet about Starr’s assertion touched off a war of words.
In his tweet, the president incorrectly claimed that McCain had finished “last in his class” at the Naval Academy in Annapolis — McCain finished fifth from last, and he never pretended to have done well in school — and incorrectly claimed that McCain had sent the dossier to the FBI before the election — McCain didn’t actually receive the dossier until after the election.
The president also took aim at McCain’s voting record on repealing and replacing ObamaCare.
“He had far worse ‘stains’ than this,” he tweeted , “including thumbs down on repeal and replace after years of campaigning to repeal and replace!” When he was later asked about his attacks on McCain, President Trump told reporters that “I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be. Thank you very much.”
In response, McCain’s daughter Meghan, who co-hosts “The View,” replied with a stinging rebuke.
“No one will ever love you the way they loved my father,” she wrote on Twitter. And she continued on her show, saying of President Trump, “your life is spent on your weekends not with your family, not with your friends, but obsessing — obsessing over great men you could never live up to. That tells you everything you need to know about his pathetic life right now.”
To be sure, amid this blistering war of words, supporters of both McCain and Trump came out to back up each of them.
That’s how these things go. But as John’s widow Cindy wanted everybody to know, support can go negative quite quickly online, and she had the receipts after someone decided to send her family a cruel, vicious message.
“I want to make sure all of you could see how kind and loving a stranger can be,” Cindy wrote sarcastically on Twitter, sharing the message with the world.
“I’m posting her note (so) her family and friends could see.” She received the message on the same day that President Trump attacked her husband on Twitter.
President Trump did not comment on Cindy’s post, but plenty of others did, even many who admitted they were not McCain supporters.
However, they could agree that such messages are uncalled for and unacceptable. “Mrs. McCain, I am sorry somebody is subjecting you to such hatred,” wrote @HowardA_Esq , for example. “Even when I disagreed with your late husband, I respected him as a patriot, and an honest and good man.”
Political analyst Donna Brazile commented as well, saying “So sorry you have to endure this level of vitriol and plain old nastiness.”
“Some folks have taken liberty to simply yell and scream. Keep your heads up dear sisters. This too shall pass,” she wrote .
