WASHINGTON – As Meghan McCain delivered a eulogy for her father Saturday, she was at times too grief-stricken to catch her breath. As she described his sickness from brain cancer or his love for her, she struggled to look up at a crowd full of boldface Washington establishment figures who had gathered at National Cathedral.
But as McCain shared one of her father’s dying directives – “Show them how tough you are” – her voice stopped wavering. The warrior’s daughter steeled herself, drew her eyes up and stepped into battle.
“The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again,” McCain said in a broadside against President Donald Trump, “because America was always great.”
Applause from the crowd rang out, rendering as tinny in a cathedral not built for the sound.
This passage from McCain’s eulogy, delivered as Trump’s own daughter Ivanka sat among the mourners, will be remembered for its explicit rebuke of the Trump-era Republican politics that John McCain had condemned as too partisan, too tribal and, as Meagan McCain put it, defined by “cheap rhetoric.”
Her emotional call to arms was also proof – as if any was needed – that McCain is her father’s daughter, a paradoxical Republican figure willing to pay the price of being politically direct.
In the hours since McCain – the eldest and by far the most publicly visible child of John McCain and his widow, Cindy – delivered her eulogy, conservatives have debated whether it was appropriate for her to have used the funeral to make a political statement, with one prominent Republican coming to her defense.
This surely would have delighted her father. Even with a deeply felt and loving eulogy, Meghan McCain, 33, did as John McCain had done so often: provoked and divided his own political party in dramatic fashion.
Meghan McCain, who built her career as a blogger and writer and is a co-host of “The View” on ABC, shares her father’s ability to pivot between righteous anger and effusive love in the span of a breath or two. Like him, she has honed a sense of timing: She understands how to toggle between each for maximum effect.
And, like him, she has taught herself to be professionally invigorated by conflict as she has thrived in the ever-closing space between politics and entertainment. She has been happy to stand publicly at odds with the shifting ideals of her own party.
Yet she is no resistance figure. She spends much of her time on “The View” battling Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, two co-hosts who offer spirited defenses of Democratic policies.
“Meghan is someone who has extremely strong beliefs about life and politics,” Behar wrote in an email Sunday, as the McCain family and other mourners gathered in Annapolis, Maryland, for John McCain’s burial. “She will argue you under the table but has great respect for you when you give it right back to her.”
She added that there was only one topic that made Meghan McCain blush: “Bring up the subject of sex on TV. I guess she worries about what her grandmother will think.”
A disciple of her father’s straight-talk approach, McCain has long confounded Republicans who say they cannot easily figure out her beliefs, and she has frustrated Democrats who want to believe that she is secretly one of them – a sentiment that only grew Saturday. She has said that abortion is tantamount to murder but has been a proponent of sex education and birth control. She supports same-sex marriage. She also supports gun rights but has said she favors some restrictions.
“Old-school Republicans,” she said in 2012, have reacted to her at times “like I’m talking about killing Ronald Reagan.”
Now, the reaction to her by Trump-era Republicans is only stronger. “It’s too bad she can’t participate in a funeral instead of lobbing political hand grenades,” Ken Cuccinelli, a former attorney general of Virginia, wrote on Twitter.
She is not a politician. At least, not yet. McCain has shied away from questions about running for office, in part because she has been vocally critical of the obstacles women in politics still face.
She shared her father’s pride in befriending people who do not share her beliefs – but not hesitating to let them know when she feels they have crossed a line. In this, she sees some family resemblance. “We’re both very strong-willed and ambitious, and I think we have a similar sense of humor,” Meghan McCain said of her father in a 2010 interview with The New York Times. “I think we both live our lives kind of fearlessly and without apologizing.”
Her scrappiness clearly pleased the senator, who relished that trait in himself. In an appearance on “The View” last fall, John McCain jokingly told her colleagues that she was an “ungovernable” child.
“I was pretty rebellious when I was younger,” Meghan McCain conceded.
“Unlike her father,” the senator quipped.
As her political views began to form, McCain channeled a hereditary sense of pugilistic extroversion into social media, blogging, writing jobs and television deals. A millennial McCain, she has publicly shared much of her life – and her father’s career.
Her career is affording her the opportunity to share her brand of politics with viewers of daytime television. In joining “The View” in October, McCain wanted to offer the program, which is popular with female viewers, a counterweight to its liberal hosts and a more modern approach to conservatism.
“I think that women need to know around the country that the media sometimes wants to act like all women live in big cities, are pro-choice and don’t want to carry guns,” she told ABC News last fall.
But some conservatives have viewed her as destructive to their causes. A decade ago, when blogging about McCain’s run for the presidency, she found herself in open warfare with conservatives like Ann Coulter. Meghan McCain was banished from the campaign weeks before it ended.
If this ever caused conflict between father and daughter, it was not visible.
“Thank you for showing me how to be a Viking warrior,” she wrote in one of many affectionate Instagram posts recently dedicated to her father, “even when some thought it more appropriate for boys.”
In the years since the 2008 election, the Republican Party has yielded to conservatives like Coulter, a onetime provocateur whose views now feel decidedly more mainstream, and paved the way for a president whose supporters tend to celebrate his divisiveness.
Still, Meghan McCain has resisted being painted as a Trump archenemy: Once publicly sympathetic to the sexism and “glass ceiling” she said Hillary Clinton faced, she has since used her platform to embrace Trump’s name-calling of Clinton as “Crooked Hillary.”
“I hate Hillary Clinton,” she said on the program this year, “as everyone here knows.”