In the two-and-a-half months since she bid her awkward farewell to The View, Meghan McCain kept her media presence pretty low-key. But this week she is back in a big way, promoting her new audio memoir Bad Republican by trashing her former co-hosts in the digital pages of Variety and on Sean Hannity’s show, where she extolled the virtues of Fox News’ “sisterhood.”
And on Wednesday, she returned to her favorite late-night haunt, Watch What Happens Live, to spill even more tea to Andy Cohen.
With the title of her book unironically displayed beneath her name on screen—and her good friend and CNN host S.E. Cupp by her side—McCain teased some of the juiciest details, sharing kind words for Rachel Maddow and Hillary Clinton while labeling Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner “funeral crashers” when her father was laid to rest.
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“They had no goddamn business being there and it still angers me, clearly,” she said. On her family’s long-running feud with former President Trump, she added, “He lost Arizona so all is well now.” This even though, according to her own husband, she herself did not vote for Joe Biden.
And yet, while Cohen mostly gave McCain a friendly platform to air her grievances, he did take an unexpected swipe at her, asking, “On a 1-to-10 scale, how hypocritical is it that you wrote a tell-all after prefacing every tell-all interview on The View with ‘I hate tell-alls?’”
Perhaps most famously, McCain told Mary Trump last summer, “I don’t like family tell-all books, especially when it comes to families with fame and power,” adding, “What do you say to people like me who think this is just a great way for you to get a paycheck right now?”
“You know, those are political tell-alls,” McCain said, nonsensically, in her defense. When Cohen asked again if she thinks she is being “hypocritical,” she shrugged and replied, “Um, I don’t, but it’s OK if other people do, I don’t really care.”
Then, after Cupp accused Katie Couric of “giddily” trashing all the women she “burned on the way up” in her new unvarnished tell-all, Cohen turned the question around on McCain, asking, “Do you think your book could be looked at as not pro-women?”
“Is it pro-women to work in an environment where, because you have a different political opinion, you are leaked about every day?” McCain shot back, not exactly answering the question.
But that wasn’t all. McCain also weighed in on her former co-hosts, saying she is still in touch with Sunny Hostin and still “adores” Whoopi Goldberg despite their on-air beef. Asked if she takes any responsibility for the “toxicity” on the show, McCain said, “Only one person was bullied out of their job and doesn’t work there anymore.”
