Meghan and Cindy McCain criticized President Trump and expressed their concerns for the future of the Republican Party in a new interview.
“I think post-Trump America for the party is going to be a very, very dark place to rebuild,” Meghan McCain said in an interview on PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover.”
McCain discussed how she worries the Republican Party will not resonate with young people, joking that young Republican groups “start at 40.” “The View” co-host also praised Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for her engagement with young voters.
“Whatever you want to say about the left, there are people like AOC that do a really good job of speaking to young people,” McCain said, referring to Ocasio-Cortez’s initials.
Cindy McCain, the wife of the late Sen. John McCain who represented Arizona in the U.S. Senate for three decades, also shared her concerns for the future of the GOP, accusing Republicans of turning their backs on an “open tent” model for the party.{mosads}
“This concerns me very much, and I’ll speak from my own home state where the party has simply left normal, what we would consider normal Republicans, behind,” Cindy McCain said. “Until our party goes back to what we were best at — and that was an open system, an open tent, we invited everybody in — those are the days that I grew up in Republican politics, and those were good years.”
Discussing what she said were some of Trump’s “controversial” decisions, she called out other Republican lawmakers for not speaking out against the president. She said her husband “gave cover to a lot of people” by often criticizing the president.
“President Trump has done some things, that you know, that all of us, as Meghan said, they’ve been controversial. They’ve been different from what any other president has done and not in good ways. And yet nobody says anything. Nobody scolds him for what really was bad manners or whatever you want to call it, whatever issue it was of the day,” McCain said.
This is not the first time Cindy McCain has recently criticized the GOP. Earlier this year, on the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, McCain said she thinks her late husband would “be very disappointed” by politics today.
“We had time to talk before he died and he was very frustrated with what was going on then. I think now he’d be even more frustrated,” McCain told CNN’s “State of the Union” in August.