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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Gustaf Kilander

Meghan McCain says Biden is a ‘disaster’ and Republican Party a ‘wasteland’ in angry monologue

Getty Images for TIME

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Political commentator Meghan McCain began her most recent podcast episode with an angry monologue laying out her relationship with the Biden family and calling President Joe Biden a “disaster.”

The episode of Citizen McCain, hosted by the daughter of the late Arizona Republican Senator and 2008 presidential nominee John McCain, was published on 28 June – the day after Biden’s dismal debate performance against former President Donald Trump.

McCain, 39, began by addressing her listeners and some of their criticism of her for her comments slamming Biden.

She said she wanted “to address something that has been popping up very intensely in our comments on social media. I am getting chastised a lot by a lot of you on Instagram for criticizing Joe Biden.”

She went on to say that it’s her job to “comment on the politics of the nation.”

“Yes, President Biden was friends with my father when he was alive and still continues to be friends with my mother,” she added. “But I think there has been a narrative put in place in no small part by ... the Biden campaign, that President Biden, his family, were best friends with my family.”

Meghan McCain addressed criticism against her for blasting Joe Biden (Getty Images for TIME)

“I didn’t even meet Joe Biden until I was 30,” she said, noting that she knew the late Democratic and later independent Senator Joe Liebermann as well as current South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham from a young age.

“I used to know Ted Kennedy when I was much younger,” she added of the late Democrat.

McCain went on to claim that “there was a point in time that President Biden was not friendly with my family because of politics,” saying that her relationship with the Bidens is “fractured.”

She said: “That is my choice. It is not my mother.”

“I do not like the kind of person President Biden has turned out to be as a leader and ... in his personal life,” she argued, referencing her guest on the program Lunden Roberts who had a child with Hunter Biden, but the first family didn’t initially recognize the child.

“I also think the Biden family has proven to be incredibly political, and I have felt ... retribution for not endorsing him when he was originally running for president,” McCain said.

She added: “President Biden has been a really bad president so far, which is why his approval ratings are the lowest they’ve ever been.

“I really rooted for him to be successful. He has been a disaster and Trump is a disaster. And that’s the situation we’re all sitting in.”

McCain went on to say that she hasn’t spoken to “Biden since his staff asked me to endorse him at the election in 2020 and I refused to do it.”

She said she was no longer politically useful to Biden and his campaign “which is why he hasn’t contacted me.”

“As I’ve said many times before, I look forward to a time in my adult life where neither Biden nor Trump will be in power,” she added.

She also blasted the notion that her father was a “raging liberal” who would have backed Biden.

“You don’t become the nominee for president for the Republican Party if you’re a raging liberal. And the idea that he would be out here supporting President Biden, particularly after his pullout in Afghanistan, knowing how hawkish and the proponent my dad was of the war in Afghanistan,” McCain said.

“I recoil at any association I ever had with the Republican Party. It’s a wasteland now,” she added.

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