Recovering from the death of her husband of 38 years was bad enough for Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ).
Dealing with the fallout from the demonstrably sick obsession of President Trump with persistently denigrating her husband more than six months after his death has been even more difficult for Mrs. McCain and her family.
After Trump tripled down on his criticism of the former Republican presidential candidate — following two vicious and unmotivated tweets over the course of a particularly unhinged weekend on the social media platform — by telling reporters that “I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be” at a media scrum before his meeting with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro yesterday, the senator’s widow struck back at Trump on his preferred platform.
Cindy McCain retweeted a comment posted by a MAGA fan she’d never met who was inspired by Trump’s despicable rhetoric to write to her with the most vile and cruel words since, well, Trump’s own remarks.
Mrs. McCain couched her tweet in treacly sarcasm, but it was apparent that her aim was to shame — shame both the stranger who felt it appropriate to send the hurtful message and the president who inspired the attack with his lunatic ravings.
I want to make sure all of you could see how kind and loving a stranger can be. I’m posting her note for her family and friends could see. pic.twitter.com/GoNCm0fv4U
— Cindy McCain (@cindymccain) March 19, 2019
Cindy McCain’s hope that her tweet would get the attention of Tiffany Nicole’s family and friends was quickly fulfilled, along with a much wider distribution across social media.
It didn’t take long before Tiffany Nichole’s Facebook page had been deleted, her Twitter account suspended, and her Instagram account was set to private, according to a report at Heavy.com. The website also discovered through the magic of Google’s caching feature that her background picture for her Facebook page was a photo of Infowars‘ Alex Jones.
Unfortunately. like the bombs that her late husband once dropped on Vietnamese peasants, Cindy McCain’s tweet was not free of collateral damage.
Another Twitter user with the same name as the offensive Trump fan lamented publicly that she had been targeted for abuse by internet trolls despite having nothing to do with the reprehensible message sent to the senator’s widow.
In an account now set to only be accessible to verified friends and followers, a different Tiffany Nichole wrote:
“LET ME SAY THIS AGAIN, I AM NOT THE “TIFFANY NICOLE” WHO SENT THAT MESSAGE TO CINDY MCCAIN!! I WOULD NEVER SEND HATEFUL WORDS TO ANYONE!!! LOOK AT THE PROFILE PIC & CLEARLY SEE THAT ITS NOT ME!!I HAVE A SISTER NAMED MEGAN. People can have the same names but that was not me..THX😭.”
Yet another Tiffany Nichole on Twitter changed her handle to “NotThatTiffany,” so the fallout from the Trump supporter’s repulsive message has affected more than one identically-named person.
Cindy McCain wasn’t the only family member to throw shade on the president for his condemnable comments on their late patriarch. Her daughter Meghan McCain used her perch on ABC’s The View to say this about Trump:
“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,” Meghan McCain said on Monday’s broadcast.
“My father was his kryptonite in life. He’s his kryptonite in death,” she added.
While the metaphor used by Meghan McCain is apt, it does imply that Trump has something in common with Superman, a concept that is as far from the truth as anything spilling across the president’s vocal cords or Twitter fingers.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by John Bowden at The Hill and by Paul Farrell at Heavy.com.
