Hours before President Donald Trump was set to give his State of the Union address on Tuesday, details started to emerge from his “off-the-record” chat with network anchors at the White House. According to reports, Trump called former Vice President Joe Biden “dumb,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer a “nasty son of a bitch” and even found a way to attack the late Sen. John McCain nearly six months after his death.
After once again complaining about McCain’s vote to preserve the Affordable Care Act, the president said, “By the way, he wrote a book and the book bombed.” He was apparently referring to the Republican senator’s final memoir, The Restless Wave, which returned to the top of The New York Times’ non-fiction best sellers list for a second time after McCain passed away from brain cancer last August.
The senator’s daughter Meghan McCain was quick to denounce Trump’s comments on Twitter, writing, “The president’s obsession with my father 6 months after his death is pathetic and telling - even at a time when he should be focusing on his message to the American public and the state of our union - the greatness of my father’s life and legacy haunts you.”
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But she was even more offended after she watched his speech.
“For me, when he's talking about we must ‘reject the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution,’ you aren't being bipartisan mere hours earlier, obsessing over people you consider your enemies,” McCain said, highlighting a quote that prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to clap at the president. “For me, it was a Kabuki theater virtue signal, the entire speech, last night, towards his base.”
“But please don’t sit here and tell me you are grasping for bipartisanship,” she continued, “when Chuck Schumer is a ‘son of a bitch’ and my father’s book ‘bombed’ and Joe Biden is ‘dumb.’”
“How pathetic do you have to be to go after somebody who’s dead?” Joy Behar added in solidarity with her co-host. “My god!”
