It’s gonna be weird when the McCains endorse Joe Biden in Arizona next year.

Which isn’t even a joke, by the way. Well, a half-joke: They’ll probably stay neutral so as to preserve their relationships with local Republican leaders. But if there’s any Democrat out there who might actually tempt the family Maverick into crossing the aisle, it’s Uncle Joe. Stay tuned.

Pretty unfair of Meg to imply that Trump doesn’t have a rich life just because he spends most of his weekends tweeting. I mean, I spend most of my own down time tweeting when I’m not blogging. And who has a richer life than me?

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1107020360803909632
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1107260609974943745

He’s wrong about a few things there, as tends to happen:

Trump’s tweet contained three errors. McCain, a member of the Naval Academy’s class of 1958, graduated fifth from last in his class. The senator was not made aware of the Steele dossier until Nov. 18, 2016 — after Trump had won the election. And there is no evidence that McCain gave the dossier to the media.

Former McCain aide David Kramer, a Russia expert, testified in a deposition in the BuzzFeed libel case in Florida that he gave the dossier to the media in December 2016. McCain himself gave the dossier to the FBI, but there is no evidence that he gave it to the media.

Take three minutes to read John’s post from last May about how the FBI obtained the dossier. Mother Jones was writing about it before McCain had it; Christopher Steele was chattering to U.S. officials about it in Rome weeks before that. Steele’s a former MI6 agent who doubtless would have been able to bring the dossier to the attention of higher-ups at the FBI eventually if McCain hadn’t done it first. And once Kramer decided to share it with the media, it was a fait accompli that the FBI would get it one way or the other.

McCain’s role in this, in other words, isn’t a matter of but-for cause in which the dossier might not have entered the public discourse if he hadn’t thought to give it to Comey. But Trump is shrewd enough to realize that righties loathe McCain, mainly for pushing amnesty for many years, and that making McCain out to be some key figure in the Russiagate saga is another way to discredit the investigation by association in their eyes. Two years ago, after the dossier first appeared in print, the Guardian reported that “McCain was reluctant to get involved because it could be seen as payback for insults Trump made about the Arizona Republican during the campaign.” Maverick knew how Trump would exploit his cameo in this. Had some Democratic senator been handed raw intelligence accusing President Hillary of colluding with an enemy power during the campaign, we’d consider it borderline treason if that senator had shoved the report in a drawer to protect her instead of handing it off to the FBI to be checked out, but the parties are different here and so the reaction is different too.

It’s weird to me that Trump wants to continue his feud with a family that has influence in a state he won by less than four points, with less than 50 percent of the vote, and which just went blue in a major Senate race possibly in part because the Republican nominee also notably snubbed John McCain. It’s worth more to him personally to dunk on Maverick than to risk losing a swing state, I guess.

.@MeghanMcCain addresses Pres. Trump’s Saturday tweet criticizing her father Sen. John McCain: “He spends his weekend obsessing over great men because he knows it and I know it and all of you know it — he will never be a great man.”https://t.co/p6oiZYUr74 pic.twitter.com/8HSpllAcEz

— The View (@TheView) March 18, 2019