(NEW YORK) — John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain rejected Kari Lake’s offer on Wednesday to meet one-on-one after Lake claimed that disparaging comments she previously made about the late senator during her failed gubernatorial run in 2022 were “said in jest.”
Lake, a former TV reporter-turned-vocal ally of former President Donald Trump, who notably feuded with John McCain, said after winning the Republican nomination to be Arizona’s governor in 2022 that she “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” referring to the family’s roots in the state.
But now, as she campaigns to represent Arizona in the U.S. Senate, Lake’s tone and strategy are shifting, a change she has suggested is in the interest of getting things done.
“I’d love nothing more than to buy you a beer, a coffee or lunch and pick your brain about how we can work together to strengthen our state,” she wrote Wednesday in a 225-word public post to Meghan McCain. “My team is sending you my contact info — if you’re willing to meet, it would mean a lot to me.”
Lake’s appeal comes after she told Arizona’s KTAR on Monday that her past comments about John McCain, such as her telling McCain supporters to “get the hell out” of an event in December 2021, were meant as a joke.
“I think that if John McCain, who had a great sense of humor, would have heard it, he would have laughed,” Lake told hosts Barry Markson and Bruce St. James.
She also said Republicans “need to get a little bit thicker skin because we’re going through some tough stuff right now and we need to be able to take a joke,” before the hosts asked her — in that spirit — to unblock them on X.
Meghan McCain, a former co-host of ABC’s The View, rejected Lake’s answer.
“Kari Lake is trying to walk back her continued attacks on my Dad (& family) and all of his loyal supporters after telling them to ‘get the hell out,"” McCain wrote in a social media post on Tuesday. “Guess she realized she can’t become a Senator without us.”
“We see you for who you are – and are repulsed by it,” she added.
Lake’s lengthy post, in turn, sought to appeal to Meghan McCain by noting they’re both mothers and both lost their fathers to cancer.
“Our movement to save Arizona & America is growing, and it’s Mama Bears like us who are leading the charge — ALL Moms want the same thing: to leave our children a better America than the one we had. It’s as simple as that,” she wrote.
“I want to make Senator McCain and Larry Lake proud,” she continued — before Meghan McCain bluntly dismissed her offer to meet.
“NO PEACE, B—-!” she wrote, in a post that was shared by Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison.
Later, Meghan McCain also posted: “I breathe fire for my family and never forgive those who have trashed any of us – particularly my Dad in death. Never.”
Markson, one of the KTAR hosts who interviewed Lake, questioned afterward why the likely Republican nominee for Senate “won’t just admit she was wrong and apologize.”
“Kari was a friend of the McCains, a close friend of the family, yet she had no problem attacking John McCain over and over, and she even attacked Cindy McCain in her recent book,” Markson wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Lake, in an interview in July 2022, accused John McCain’s widow, Cindy McCain, of running a scheme to promote a “globalist” agenda.
“This is the Cindy McCain branch of the Republican Party. They’re not Republicans. … I think they want an end to America,” Lake said at the time.
Her new outreach to Meghan McCain appears to be part of a larger trend of her attempting to mend relationships with so-called “establishment Republicans” she torched during her unsuccessful gubernatorial run.
Asked Tuesday on KTAR if she’d won back over any of those Republicans, Lake said she’s having conversations “that would shock you.”
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