Meghan McCain continued her scorched-earth trashing of The View on Tuesday night, running to the friendly confines of Sean Hannity’s primetime Fox News show to claim that she was “punished” for being a “strong conservative” in a “liberal space.”
More specifically, the former View host said she suffered “real trauma” because she was “targeted for not voting for President Obama” and being pro-life.
Two months after exiting the daytime ABC talk show she co-hosted for four years, McCain has been promoting her Audible memoir by dishing about all the juicy backstage drama between her and her former View colleagues. Likening the culture of the show to the “toxic work environment” of Ellen, McCain also said Joy Behar’s dismissive on-air reaction after she returned from maternity leave led to her having a panic attack and sobbing uncontrollably.
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McCain, who left Fox News in 2017 to join The View, told Hannity that while she enjoyed her time on the “number one show in daytime,” she felt that “you are targeted if you’re the token conservative.” Because of that, McCain said, she thought it “was really time for me to show my story instead of having it through the lens of the liberal media and the liberal people who were leaking internally on the show I worked on.”
Hannity, meanwhile, said that while he’s personally had “minor skirmishes here and there with a few on-air talent,” he didn’t think it was anything compared to McCain’s experience at The View, which he described as a “cancerous environment.”
“It’s all very personal,” responded McCain. “Being a conservative woman in mainstream media is deeply threatening, being a woman who can hold her own on a show like that proved to be ultimately threatening.”
While continuing to slag her former show and co-hosts, McCain gushed over her time at Fox News. “I had a sisterhood at Fox that I lost at The View, and I know what women supporting women looks like, because I had it when I worked at Fox News,” she exclaimed. “And now I know what the entire opposite experience is.”
(After McCain announced she was departing The View in July, Fox News expressed interest in McCain returning, saying she’s “a star and we are always interested in exceptional talent.” Sources close to McCain, however, told The Daily Beast at the time that “she’s really outgrown” Fox, as “they’re just batshit crazy over there.”)
Telling Hannity “it’s been difficult to open up to people like you,” the ex-Fox News personality asserted that she had been victimized due to her conservative political stance.
“I thought it was important to say there is a real trauma that is involved when you are targeted and targeted and targeted for not voting for President Obama, for being a pro-life woman,” McCain intoned. “And I don’t think people who go into liberal spaces, which is basically every other space except Fox News in media, I don’t think you should be punished for it and I don’t think your personal life should be impacted and that is unfortunately exactly what happened to me.”
Asked about her father—John McCain, the late senator and 2008 GOP presidential nominee—encouraging her to take The View job, McCain said she thinks “it is important that we have to fight the culture war in their spaces.” Stating that her dad said she was up for it because she’s a “strong conservative,” McCain admitted that she actually enjoyed being on the show early on.
“But like I said, as I grew stronger and more and more people would come on the show and I would really hold liberal guests feet to the fire, I felt a lot of backlash, both internally and externally at the show,” she added.
She ended the interview by expressing sympathy for Sarah Palin, her father’s 2008 presidential running mate. Claiming that she has a “whole new lens” of viewing Palin now, McCain said her dad’s campaign team “set her up for failure,” singling out current MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace in particular.
“I just really hope that the culture has some redemption for Sarah Palin in the same way that we have for so many other women right now,” McCain concluded.
Just last year, however, McCain was urging then-presidential candidate Joe Biden not to make the same mistake as her father when it came to picking a running mate, confirming that the choice of Palin was one of her father’s “biggest regrets.”
