The morning after the politically-charged Grammy Awards, the liberal hosts at ABC’s The View were thrilled with the show’s anti-Trump agenda, but lone conservative host Meghan McCain called the display “tone-deaf.”
ABC first played a clip from the show where musicians read quotes from Michael Wolff’s gossipy book Fire and Fury, ending with a surprise cameo by Hillary Clinton. Just like the liberal celebrities in the room that night, most of the View hosts couldn’t get enough of it.
As the studio audience roared with applause at the Clinton cameo, host Sunny Hostin gushed, “I loved it!”
On-screen, ABC’s chyron read, “Hillary trolls Trump in Grammys skit.” Hostin continued raving about the incredulous response celebrities gave while reading from the book.
“I loved it. I especially loved Cardi B’s response, like ‘he lived his life like this?’ and I was like, ‘he does Cardi B!’” Hostin praised.
She went on to call the anti-Trump display appropriate, because, after all, Presidents Obama and Carter had won the spoken word Grammy…?
“I thought what was interesting was the spoof was about the spoken word Grammy and President Obama has won it twice, Jimmy Carter has won it twice, and Whoopi has one for spoken word as well. I thought it was perfectly tonal. Like, it made sense,” she stated.
Guest host Ana Navarro agreed.“I thought it was funny, right?” she grinned, saying that Trump deserved to be mocked by Clinton.
“And certainly Donald Trump spends a lot of time tweaking Hillary Clinton and talking Hillary, crooked Hillary. She could take a jab back,” Navarro added before arguing that Wolff’s allegations against Nikki Haley was a different story.
Turning to Joy Behar, Navarro joked, “If somebody said you had an affair with Donald Trump, you wouldn't find it funny either.”
Navarro was referring to the story that broke last week, where the controversial author spread rumors about the UN Ambassador having a secret affair with President Trump, hinting to the relationship in his media-hyped book. While the media has largely been on Haley’s side, they still have touted and praised Wolff’s book as legitimate. Except for Meghan McCain, the hosts of The View didn’t see the contradiction either, praising the Grammy reading but going on to defend the same book’s accusations against Haley.
McCain, whose voice was affected by a cold, took up the defense for Haley, blasting the reading as “tone-deaf.” She argued that the reaction to this book reading would’ve been completely different if President Obama had been in office while these allegations were made against his UN Ambassador:
My problem with this is, I want you to imagine a parallel universe where there's this gossipy book where it's been proven to use off the record conversations, very salacious, where there's a rumor or implication that President Obama is having an affair with Samantha Power, the former Ambassador to the United Nations that Nikki Haley took over her job.
McCain stopped to clarify for a lost Joy Behar.
“Where President Obama is having an affair with Samantha Power and someone goes on television, another politician that ran against him, my father, makes a joke on this very book. I think it is tone deaf,” she argued.
McCain added, “For me that book, that's the political part of the Grammys I had a problem with.”
But Navarro joked that if Obama had an affair, “we wouldn’t even be talking about it,” because “Michelle would’ve killed him.”
Hostin agreed, but made it about the media’s supposedly unfair treatment of President Obama. “Or his impeachment!” she added, as the approving audience applauded.
As Navarro did previously, Hostin then flip-flopped to heap praise on the Wolff book while discrediting his allegations against Haley.
I will say, I agree with you Meghan in the sense that why is it that a woman who has been successful who has had a stellar political career, the implication is the way she got there was by sleeping her way to the top and I think that's really offensive given Nikki Haley's record. She's been a stellar politician. She’s had such a wonderful career. I think it's terrible that the other whisper campaign is about Hope Hicks, the young girl.
Navarro agreed, calling Haley “an outstanding U.N. Ambassador,” and “voice” for “issues about Venezuela and Cuba.”
"I think she's got everybody right to be pissed about this book,” she gushed, before the show cut to commercial.
