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This Is What Meghan McCain Thinks About Trump Visiting The City Where Her Dad Was A POW
Meghan McCain has never been one to shy away from criticizing the president, and it was no different on Wednesday. In a tweet referencing the prison where her late father was detained and tortured during the Vietnam War, McCain asked Trump if he visited "Hanoi Hilton" yet on his trip to Vietnam for the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
McCain's tweet was in response to Trump's jab at Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal on Wednesday morning. "I have now spent more time in Vietnam than Da Nang Dick Blumenthal, the third rate Senator from Connecticut (how is Connecticut doing?)," Trump tweeted. In 2008, Blumenthal suggested that he physically served in the Vietnam War. He later on apologized for "misspeaking."
"His war stories of his heroism in Vietnam were a total fraud," Trump added, "he was never even there. We talked about it today with Vietnamese leaders!"
In response, McCain responded to the president saying, "Have you taken a trip to the Hanoi Hilton yet?"
"Hanoi Hilton" is the nickname for the Hỏa Lò prison in Hanoi, Vietnam, where McCain's late father, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, was detained and tortured, per Yahoo. McCain's irked reaction to Trump points to the president's history of disparaging her father. In 2015, Trump said of the Arizona senator: "He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured." Trump himself did not enlist in the military due to a supposed bone spurs diagnosis.
Recently, McCain talked frankly about the presence of Trump's daughter and son-in-law at her father's funeral. On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, McCain said that she was "uncomfortable" to see Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner there. The president was not invited.
"When we were working on it, I didn’t actually think about who would be attending the funeral, strangely. The answer is no, I did not know that they would be attending his funeral and it’s weird to talk about it," McCain told Colbert.
"A funeral is sort of, obviously, a sacred time, and I thought that my family had made it clear, at least I had, that the Trumps are unwelcome around me," she added. "And my father had been very clear about the line between the McCains and the Trumps."
Seeing Ivanka and Kushner at her dad's funeral at first "surprised" her, McCain told Colbert. "It made me uncomfortable, and I hope I made them uncomfortable, honestly, with everything," the conservative View co-host added.
Can people expect to see the late Arizona senator's daughter call out Trump in the future? It looks like the answer is "yes." McCain told Colbert, "I really want it made very clear that the Trumps had beef with me then and in the words of Cardi B, 'They’re going to have beef with me forever, and I’m not going to forget.'"
It remains to be seen if Trump will respond to McCain's rebuke. For now, he appears to be preoccupied with Kim.