During a Wednesday interview with Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker, The View’s Meghan McCain did what she apparently does best: Make the conversation about herself and, in this case, her personal beef with a presidential hopeful.
After applauding Booker for saying Medicare for All is unrealistic, the conservative View co-host took issue with the New Jersey senator’s support for mandatory gun buybacks. This then prompted McCain to lump Booker in with former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who has made buybacks a central focus of his campaign.
“When I heard you and Beto say that, to me, that’s like a left-wing fever dream,” McCain said. “And I want to know how you think you and Beto are going to go to red states and go to my brother’s house and get his AR-15s because, let me tell you, he’s not giving it back.”
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Booker, meanwhile, asserted he is not nearly where O’Rourke is when it comes to gun buybacks, causing McCain to reply, “Good! Because he’s crazy!”
“We should watch the way we talk about each other,” Booker shot back. “Seriously, we can’t tear the character of people down. We have different beliefs.”
McCain, however, invoked her ongoing feud with the one-time Texas Senate candidate, complaining that O’Rourke “has no problem doing it to me.”
“He was very nasty to me about this,” the ex-Fox News star lamented.
Last month, reacting to McCain’s overt warning that gun buybacks would lead to “a lot of violence” from gun owners, O’Rourke said “that kind of language and rhetoric is not helpful” and it could become “self-fulfilling” and give permission to violence.
“You and I both know that just because somebody does something to us, doesn’t mean we show the same thing back to them,” Booker responded to McCain, garnering audience applause.
“I’m not running for president, with all due respect,” McCain snapped back. “And the way he talks about me inciting violence on this, I take very seriously and I speak for a lot of red state Americans whether he likes it or you like it or not, there’s a lot of Republicans you have to win over.”
The New Jersey lawmaker reacted by telling McCain that her voice was one he respected before noting that “what we say about other people says more about us than it does about them.”
Booker would then go on to relay an anecdote from the campaign trail in which he defused a voter’s call for violence against President Donald Trump. McCain, meanwhile, brushed it aside and went back to pressing Booker on his buyback proposal and how he’s going to take her brother’s guns.
After a bit more back-and-forth over Booker's gun proposals, host Whoopi Goldberg jumped in to send the show to a commercial break, promising the pair that they’d continue the conversation in the next segment.
“No we’re not,” McCain grumbled. “It’s fine.”
