Meghan McCain is urging Sen. Amy Klobuchar not to invoke her father, the late Sen. John McCain, during the 2020 presidential campaign after Klobuchar recounted a story about Sen. McCain criticizing Donald Trump at his inauguration.
Over the weekend, Sen. Klobuchar recalled sitting next to McCain during Trump’s swearing-in two years ago.
In his inaugural address to the nation, President Trump painted a grim picture of “American carnage” which he vowed to end.
“The arc that we are on, this arc of justice, started the day after that dark inauguration,” Klobuchar said in Iowa on Saturday, according to HuffPost and NBC News.
“The day when I sat on that stage between Bernie and John McCain, and John McCain kept reciting to me names of dictators during that speech, because he knew more than any of us what we were facing as a nation,” she continued. “He understood it. He knew because he knew this man more than any of us did.”
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Klobuchar, described last year by the New York Times as a “McCain protégée,” has also described him as her mentor, according to NBC. She visited him at his family’s Arizona ranch as he was dying of brain cancer, the network reported.
Days after Klobuchar’s story about Trump and Sen. McCain, daughter Meghan weighed in.
“On behalf of the entire McCain family – @amyklobuchar please be respectful to all of us and leave my fathers legacy and memory out of presidential politics,” she tweeted on Monday.
In a statement later Monday, a Klobuchar aide said she “had a long-time friendship with Senator McCain, she has defended him against President Trump’s attacks in the past, and she has deep respect for his family.”
“While she was simply sharing a memory, she continues to believe that the best stories about Senator McCain are not about the views he had about President Trump: they are about McCain’s own valor and heroism,” said Amy For America Communications Director Tim Hogan.
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According to NBC, Saturday was the first time Klobuchar relayed that scene from President Trump’s inauguration, though “she has regularly praised McCain in speeches and interviews.”
Klobuchar, 59, is in her third term as a Minnesota senator. She is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination to challenge Trump, basing her campaign in part on her strong Midwestern appeal.
Meghan, a 34-year-old conservative co-host on The View, is her father’s most outspoken defender and has taken up the mantle of his memory since he died last August at 81.
Neither she nor her father are Trump supporters. The president regularly derided Sen. McCain both before his death and in the months afterward.
Amid the most recent wave of Trump insults earlier this year, Meghan said on The View, “My father was his kryptonite in life, he’s his kryptonite in death.”