Meghan McCain’s tenure on “The View” lasted longer than one might have expected. Despite years of infighting, viral clips of tense exchanges and subsequent tweets defending her stances, McCain co-hosted the daytime talk show for four seasons before announcing she would hang up her hat.
McCain, who will remain on the show through the end of July, attributed her decision to leave the New York-based show to a desire to spend more time at home in the Washington area with her husband, Fox News contributor Ben Domenech, and their young daughter, Liberty. She referred to her time on “The View” as one of the “greatest, most exhilarating, wonderful privileges of my entire life.”
The daughter of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), as she frequently mentioned on-air, Meghan McCain joined the show in October 2017 after guest co-hosting several years prior. As its main conservative voice, she quickly became a polarizing figure. She expressed after her first season that she had been “really hesitant” to join the panel of hosts, and made note of that initial hesitation Thursday while announcing her imminent departure.
“I didn’t want to join the show, as I talked about in the past,” she said. “It was my dad who encouraged me to do it. He said I should never give up an opportunity to work on such an iconic show and work with Whoopi Goldberg. He was right. It was one of the last things he told me to do.”
Though not all of McCain’s memorable moments on “The View” were combative — such as when Joe Biden, a year removed from his vice presidency, comforted McCain about her ailing father — the viral clips often were. McCain’s arguments with Goldberg became heated. In December 2019, as the co-hosts discussed President Trump’s first impeachment hearings, McCain spoke over Goldberg, who responded, “Girl, please stop talking. Please stop talking right now.”
The tension has persisted and seemed to reach a breaking point last month, when Goldberg and McCain insisted they each “don’t care” about how the other feels toward some of President Biden’s behavior. They apologized to one another after the commercial break for being “rude.”
Joy Behar, similarly at odds with McCain, has been blunt about her feelings. After McCain returned from maternity leave in January, the two fought about division within the Republican and Democratic parties. Behar said to McCain point-blank that she “did not miss” her while she was gone from the show. In May, Behar told McCain she needed to “have some respect” for those with more experience than her.
Though McCain has been vocal about her distaste toward Trump, she made a habit of pointing out how her conservative views contrasted with those of her liberal co-hosts and, in April, accused the show of having a “liberal bias.” Her friend and former co-host Abby Huntsman — who, as the daughter of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr., shared McCain’s conservative political background — left “The View” last year amid reports of a toxic work environment and an increasingly “strained” relationship with McCain.
Rumors of behind-the-scenes drama is nothing new for “The View,” though ABC representatives have often denied them; while announcing her departure Thursday, McCain made a point to thank Huntsman as well. McCain’s current co-hosts then reflected on the past few years.
“Your dad was very smart,” Goldberg said. “He wanted you to be here with us because we could help toughen you up for what was coming: this wonderful baby you were going to have, and his departure.”
Sunny Hostin joked that the senator had warned her she would need to “learn to love [McCain] and understand her, and that she would be a pain in the a--, and he was right about all those things.”
Behar kept her farewell diplomatic.
“You and I have had our disagreements,” Behar said. “We’ve had our fights, but we’ve also had our drinking moments, which were rather interesting. … We’re on a show where we stick our necks out. We take the blowback. We take a lot of hits on this show, and we stick by our points of view. You have done that brilliantly for four years, and I hope you can say I’ve done the same thing. I really appreciated that you were a formidable opponent, in many ways.”
McCain concluded the segment by criticizing misogynist media coverage of “The View,” and calling for her co-hosts to be treated better in the future. She said that “if five men were doing what we do every day, I really do believe that we’d probably have a Pulitzer Prize at this point.”
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