And you know how pro-American Middle Eastern Muslims usually are.

I understand he has a beef with Trump but is there any actual evidence of this happening? Which Middle Eastern countries are seeing protests over what one guy in one party’s primary in the United States may or may not have said about a registry of Muslims? More specifically, which Muslims who weren’t already inclined to dislike America for other reasons have suddenly tilted towards disapproval now that Trump can’t stop talking about celebrations in New Jersey on 9/11?

The bitter irony of this clip, of which every dove reading this is already aware, is that McCain’s brand of interventionism in the region has doubtless alienated many, many, many more Muslims than Trump has in his interviews. You can get a taste of that in this tracker of favorable views of America over the past 15 years published in June by Pew:

Lebanon is complicated because it’s multisectarian but the Sunni states — Turkey, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories — all saw a dive circa 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq, with only modest recovery since. (European opinion also dropped and has yet to come all the way back in Germany and the UK from its 1999-2000 high.) American intervention in the region is a staple of jihadi propaganda when recruiting, as a casus belli to either remove the Crusaders from the region or to fight the Shiites brought to power by the Americans in Baghdad. None of which is to say that intervention is wrong per se — you might conclude that removing Saddam was worth risking all of that — but you might want to ease off on pointing fingers about risking damage to Muslim opinion of the U.S. if you’re one of America’s most outspoken supporters of the war.

In this same interview McCain and his pal Graham called for 20,000 American troops on the ground in Syria and Iraq, which won’t have an effect on Muslim views of America at all.