The Donald is failingly punching back at the late Sen. John McCain, still

Not long after his death in 2018, the late Sen. John McCain signed a long-term lease on an empty, unfurnished condominium inside the head of Donald Trump.

During the intervening years McCain has visited his ghostly pad within The Donald’s cranium as often as he pleases.

You might recall, for example, only a year after McCain’s passing, Trump headed to Japan for a state visit, only to learn that the Navy’s USS John McCain might be within view during his stay.

Haunted by the coincidence, Trump ordered that a tarp be placed over the ship’s name.

Sailors were forced to remove anything that had McCain’s name on it. Then a barge was moved close to the ship to further obscure the name.

McCain knew emperor Trump had no clothes

As everyone knows, Trump began attacking McCain early on during his presidential run, mostly because McCain was one of the few Republicans to point out that the party’s new emperor had no clothes.

For example, when Russia’s Vladimir Putin denied any Russian interference in the U.S. election, and Trump accepted his explanation, even after 12 Russian military officers were indicted for the crime, McCain said that “no prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”

He added, “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.”McCain was in Trump’s head when the senator was alive and he’s been in there, off and on, ever since.

Trump seems to have admitted as much in a new book. It’s a $95 grift aimed at the gullible shills who’ve been handing him money since he lost the election.

Trump letters reveal how McCain haunts him

The book is called “Letters to Trump,” and features correspondence and commentary.

In it, Trump writes about McCain, “I never warmed to him, never felt good about anybody having anything to do with John McCain and never will, even despite the fact that at their request, I gave him the world’s longest funeral, 11 days. Much like his wars, it never ended.”

That, of course, is both crassly insulting and not true.

Rage politics: Kari Lake embraces Trump rhetoric against McCain, others

Trump did not “give” McCain’s family the senator’s funeral. He had nothing to do with it. And the events surrounding memorial services and burial for McCain lasted five days.

None of that matters to Trump. McCain haunts him.

Trump's head must be like the Hanoi Hilton

Trump’s obsession with McCain has even led him to attack the late senator’s daughter, Meghan, calling her a “bully” and a “lowlife” and saying, “At the request of many of [Meghan’s] representatives, I made it possible for her father to have the world’s longest funeral, designed and orchestrated by him, even though I was never, to put it mildly, a fan. In his own very special way, he was a RINO’s RINO.”

Back in 1982, when the former naval aviator who’d spent 5-plus years in a brutal Vietnamese POW camp moved to Phoenix and ran for Congress, McCain was referred to by some as a “carpetbagger.”

He responded by first speaking of his family’s long military tradition and ended, “As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.”

McCain has been inside Trump’s head just about the same amount of time.

I’d guess the accommodations aren’t much different.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The Donald can't help but punch wildly at the late John McCain, still