Meghan McCain has mocked Kari Lake after a poll showed the MAGA Republican trailing her Democratic challenger for the Arizona Senate seat by double digits.
The daughter of the late Arizona senator John McCain posted three cry laughing emojis on X, formerly Twitter, while sharing a Fox News survey revealing Lake is behind Ruben Gallego by 15 points [56 percent to 41].
In a since-deleted post, Meghan McCain had attacked Lake, a staunch Donald Trump supporter and 2020 election denier, saying, in response to the Fox News poll: “It’s almost like Kari may have needed some McCain republicans after all …”
Lake’s office has been contacted for comment via email.
Lake and Megan McCain, a political commentator and former host of The View, have long held a feud after Lake made a series of disparaging remarks about John McCain and the moderate Republican influence he still holds in Arizona.
John McCain, who ran for president in 2008, held office in Arizona for 35 years before his death in 2018, aged 81.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for TIME/Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
In 2022, when Lake was running for Arizona governor, the MAGA Republican said her GOP gubernatorial primary victory “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.”
Lake told the WarRoom podcast, hosted by Trump ally Steve Bannon, in May 2022 that John McCain was “reaching up from the grave trying to keep power on Arizona.”
Days before the November 2022 election, Lake also asked a crowd during a campaign event “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? All right, get the hell out,” before adding, “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?”
Lake went on to lose the Arizona gubernatorial election to Democrat Katie Hobbs, and frequently tried to overturn the results via the courts while citing unsubstantiated election fraud claims.
Lake is now running for the Arizona Senate seat to be left vacant by outgoing independent Kyrsten Sinema, with polls frequently suggesting Gallego is the favorite to win November’s race.
In February 2024, Lake walked back on her previous attacks on John McCain, insisting they were done in “jest.”
“And I think that if John McCain, who had a great sense of humor, would have heard it, he would have laughed,” Lake told the Arizona-based radio show Outspoken with Bruce and Gaydos.
In response, Meghan McCain suggested Lake is now only trying to appeal to supporters of her father knowing she cannot win the Arizona Senate race without them.
“Kari Lake is trying to walk back her continued attacks on my Dad (& family) and all of his loyal supporters after telling them to ‘get the hell out’. Guess she realized she can’t become a Senator without us,” she posted.
“No peace, b****. We see you for who you are – and are repulsed by it.”
Trump himself had frequently attacked John McCain before and after his death from brain cancer.
This includes saying the senator, who spent more than five years being tortured in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, was “not a war hero” in 2015.
“He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said.
In March 2019, several months after John McCain’s death, Trump also told reporters at the White House that the late senator’s vote against repealing the Affordable Health Care act was “disgraceful” before adding “I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be.”
