NEW YORK, NY.- Usually, critics wait until a show is running to slam it, but Meghan McCain broke the embargo. By more than five months.

“This is trash,” she posted on social media on April 2. “Nothing more than a gross cash grab by mediocre desperate people. I hope it bombs.”

Perhaps she can be forgiven her haste for distaste. “Ghost of John McCain,” the show she was preemptively attacking, is about her father, who died in 2018. A musical satire that pictures him in purgatory — bedeviled by Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton and a pole-dancing Lindsey Graham in a studded pink dog collar — probably seemed unlikely to be reverent.

If only irreverence were the problem! But the show that opened Tuesday at SoHo Playhouse turns out to be, in its muddled way, something of a love letter. It’s just a bad one.

Start with the title, which promises a posthumous haunting of America by the former Arizona senator but mostly delivers a familiar and unfunny indictment of Trump. McCain and the other characters are figments of 45’s fevered imagination, imprisoned in his brain (depicted as a three-star hotel) until they admit that he is “the greatest president who’s ever lived.” For McCain that means abandoning what he considers his legacy as a principled politician and maverick Republican.

This baroque and entirely internal conflict puts the title character in a dramaturgical purgatory even worse than the theological one. He’s essentially stuck playing Trump’s game, with no agency of his own. It’s Trump who thus scores the few smart zingers in Scott Elmegreen’s unruly book: “You started Trumpism,” he tells McCain. “When you picked Sarah Palin.” Palin, McCain’s running mate in the 2012 presidential election, then shows up shooting an already dead wolf at close range with a shotgun.

That’s how I felt about the show. Having Clinton sing an “I Told You So” number (“Who could foresee/Oh that’s right — me!”) is low-grade “SNL” obvious. Forcing Graham to flounce around in fishnet and pleather to a sophomoric gay double-entendre tune called “Good Boy” is perhaps worse. Though pleasant enough musically, the songs by Drew Fornarola lack sufficient lyrical craft to land the jokes, some of which should not be allowed to touch down anyway.

Even so, the cast sometimes rises above the material. Lindsay Nicole Chambers makes a sly Clinton and a hilarious composite Trumpian “daughter-wife.” Jason Tam is a beamish yet dignified McCain, except when competing in a debate with Trump that is staged, by director Catie Davis, as a chaotic dance-off.

Easy opportunism is no sin; it’s what downtown satire, pulling every possible thread in case one might be comic gold, has done forever. Nor is amateurishness a deal-killer when it is jolly and well matched to the material.

But “Ghost of John McCain” gets into the kind of trouble Meghan McCain may have anticipated when it gets serious. The fate of real humans, and a real country, are not suitably addressed by sloppy high jinks and smarmy low jokes. When the show uses McCain’s imprisonment and torture by the North Vietnamese at the so-called Hanoi Hilton to achieve some gravity, it comes at too much expense to dramatic, let alone moral, proportion.

I hope his daughter never has to see that, though the producers, in an open letter published this month, have invited her to attend. Stating that they would never do anything to “besmirch your father’s legacy,” they point out that the senator had a “wickedly salty sense of humor” himself. “I like to think he would have been as amused as anyone by what we’ve created,” they wrote.

He certainly could not be less amused than I was.

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‘Ghost of John McCain’

Through Nov. 10 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. Running Time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.