As Red State‘s Elizabeth Vaughn wrote yesterday, 2020 presidential hopeful and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) was on the campaign trail over the weekend in Iowa. While there, she recalled a moment she said she shared with the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) during Pres. Donald Trump’s inauguration.

A brief recap – via the NBC News:

Klobuchar, D-Minn., recounted a story in Iowa this weekend in which the Sen. McCain, her longtime colleague in Washington, seemed to compare President Donald Trump to various authoritarian leaders.

“The arc that we are on, this arc of justice, started the day after that dark inauguration,” Klobuchar said. “The day when I sat on that stage between Bernie and John McCain, and John McCain kept reciting to me names of dictators during that speech, because he knew more than any of us what we were facing as a nation. He understood it. He knew because he knew this man more than any of us did.”

While it was the first time Klobuchar recited that particular anecdote, she has regularly praised McCain in speeches and interviews. The senator visited McCain while he was battling cancer at his Arizona ranch and described him as a “mentor” after his death.

As it turns out, the McCain family wants John McCain’s name kept out of presidential politics. Daughter Meghan McCain responded on Twitter on behalf of her family earlier today by telling Klobuchar to stop mentioning the late Senator’s name when campaigning:

On behalf of the entire McCain family – @amyklobuchar please be respectful to all of us and leave my fathers legacy and memory out of presidential politics.

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) May 27, 2019

As Fox News reminds us, John McCain and Donald Trump did not get along well at all:

Trump and the Arizona senator had a tense relationship, with then-candidate Trump claiming at a 2015 event that the Vietnam War veteran “was a war hero because he was captured.”

After Trump held a joint news conference in 2018 with Russian President Vladimir Putin, McCain responded in a statement claiming “the damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.”

Rumors swirled in April that the McCain family would be supporting the presidential campaign of Obama’s former veep Joe Biden, but Cindy McCain put those rumors to rest by tweeting that the family had “no intention of getting involved in presidential politics.”

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—Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here. Connect with her on Twitter.–