Trump's taunt of John McCain reads like trouble for Kari Lake

Donald Trump took a potshot at John McCain on Saturday, mocking the late senator who has been in his grave for five years now.

I picture McCain laughing his head off, to be living still in the ex-president’s head.

I picture Democratic Senate hopeful Ruben Gallego writing a thank-you note.

And his Republican opponent, Kari Lake?

I picture her tugging with all her might at that infamous stake she drove into the heart of the “McCain machine” in 2022 — only to watch as her mentor drove it all the deeper over the weekend.

Trump has hated McCain for years

Trump has been obsessed with McCain for years. Maybe it’s because Arizona’s senior senator served honorably and acted heroically while being held prisoner and tortured during the Vietnam War while Trump was at home nursing his bone spurs.

Maybe it’s because McCain dared to speak truth to power early on and often as Trump rode a nationalist wave into the White House, while all around him once-reluctant Republicans lined up to join the parade.

Or maybe it’s because, in the end, McCain was willing to break with his party when he thought it was good for America.

Regardless of the reason, Trump cannot let go of his blood feud with the late senator who now resides in the heavenly hereafter. And in Trump’s head.

During a campaign stop in Iowa on Saturday, Trump mocked McCain’s war injury as he griped about McCain casting the deciding vote that saved the Affordable Care Act in 2017.

“Obamacare is a catastrophe, nobody talks about it. You know, without John McCain, we would have had it done. John McCain, for some reason, couldn’t get his arm up that day. Remember?” Trump said, as he reenacted McCain’s thumbs-down vote. “He goes like that. That was the end of that.”

That doesn't help Kari Lake now

McCain couldn’t raise his arms above his head because of injuries he suffered when his fighter plane was shot down over Hanoi. It likely didn't help that he was tortured for five years at the hands of the North Vietnamese.

Trump’s taunt quickly refractured the split between the Party of McCain and the Party of Trump, with McCain backers taking offense and Trump supporters taking to social media to lambaste McCain as a “traitor,” a “disgrace” and “one of the most evil men to ever walk the face of the Earth.”

And Kari Lake? She, who has something to say about everything, was silent.

It’s difficult to see Trump’s mockery as anything but a disaster for Lake.

Trump is still failing: to punch at Sen. McCain

Her whole campaign is based upon being Trump in high heels, after all — a perpetually polished, camera-ready rage machine who is phenomenally popular with people who rock red caps and “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirts

Yet that was a losing proposition during Arizona's 2022 governor’s race, when she famously told McCain supporters to “get the hell out” of one of her campaign events and noted, “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?”She celebrated her Republican primary win by boasting that she “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.”

Which then repaid her by making Democrat Katie Hobbs governor.

Lake could've defended McCain. She's silent

Kari Lake 2.0, the Senate candidate, is supposed to be a new, improved version — a deeper Lake who embraces the Big Tent rather than dreaming of using that tent pole to string up RINOs and McCain moderates.

Lake, at the urging of national Senate Republicans, spent the final months of 2023 reaching out to those in the more moderate wing of the Republican party — the gold diggers, the cartel “doormats,” the uniparty plotters of global dominion.

You know, your standard McCain supporters.

It hasn’t gone so well.

“For her to make peace, the apology would have to be a public apology instead of phone calls and coffees,” Republican consultant Marcus Dell’Artino told me on Sunday. “And that will NEVER happen. So the problem will persist.”

Actually, the problem just got worse.

Trump’s mockery of McCain over the weekend offered the perfect opportunity for Lake to come to the defense of the senator she once called “a war hero, icon and a force to be reckoned with.”

A chance to show that Senate wannabe Lake is a cut above the scorched-earth style of gubernatorial wannabe Lake. To show that her newfound outreach to McCain Republicans is about more than snookering them into giving Mini-Me Trump their vote.

And Lake — who has something to say about everything — was disappointingly, unsurprisingly, utterly predictably silent.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @LaurieRoberts or on Threads at @laurierobertsaz.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Trump taunts John McCain — and makes trouble for Kari Lake