When Meghan McCain suddenly left The View, one TV critic hailed her turn as "a highly effective heel, a love-to-hate reality villain." But Meghan McCain's forthcoming audio memoir Bad Republican insists her liberal partners on the show were the villains. Howard Kurtz at Fox News revealed some of the details of her "scorching response."
What will generate the gossipy headlines is McCain’s account of her searingly personal conflicts with Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg. And she makes no attempt to sugarcoat their tortured relationship or pretend that behind the scenes they were all gal pals.
There was "toxic, direct and purposeful hostility" from the two women, McCain writes, and it "grew meaner and less forgiving" as Trump’s tenure wore on, "as if I had become an avatar for everything they hated about the president." And that was strange, because "Whoopi and Joy saw front and center the emotional trauma I had experienced from President Trump’s attacks on my family."
McCain was troubled by the "open disdain" from Goldberg, who sometimes harshly cut her off on the air: "Once she turns on you, it can create unfathomable tension at the table."
McCain recounts returning from maternity leave back in January and Joy Behar saying angrily she was not missed:
On her second day back at work, during an on-air squabble with Behar about the Democratic Party, McCain tried a tongue-in-cheek line: "Joy, you missed me so much when I was on maternity leave. You missed fighting with me."
"I did not," Behar said. "I did not miss you. Zero."
McCain was stunned. "I felt like I’d been slapped," she said.
When the show went to commercial, McCain burst into "uncontrollable sobbing" at the "nasty" remark. She pulled herself together, but with her hormones raging, she describes the experience as "intensely heartbreaking."
After the show, McCain resumed crying and threw up in a garbage can. And that’s when she concluded: "This s*** isn’t worth it. Nothing in life is worth it."
McCain later told her executive producer to ask Behar to apologize, since "she had humiliated me live on air." She was told that would not happen. Behar, she felt, smelled her vulnerability "like a shark smells blood in the water."
Our Kristine Marsh noted at the time Whoopi also unloaded on McCain. In 2018, the liberal panel turned on the only pro-life host with Whoopi yelling that McCain and Republicans need to "get out of my vagina." At the end of 2019, Whoopi lost her temper with McCain again, telling her, “Girl, please stop talking! Please stop talking right now!”
Kurtz reports McCain also discusses her contentious late-night fight with socialist Seth Meyers on NBC in 2019, when he tried to shame her out of criticizing Ilhan Omar.
What emerges is a portrait of a woman who is in fact treated differently by the media establishment because she is a conservative Republican. In 2019, Seth Meyers turned an NBC interview with a pregnant McCain on his late-night show into a confrontation, and after hours of crying, she refused to take a makeup call from him....
When Seth Meyers sent her a conciliatory note after their unpleasant clash, he thanked her for appearing at an "away game."
Republicans always play an "away game" with the badly named "mainstream media."
