Meghan McCain, The View’s resident conservative co-host, said Monday that the now-infamous footage of a sullen President Donald Trump shuffling off Marine One after his lightly attended Tulsa rally will “haunt” his campaign and could be the “writing on the wall.”
Following days of hype from his campaign that hundreds of thousands of supporters reserved tickets and an overflow crowd was expected for his rally in Tulsa, only 6,200 people attended the event—less than one-third of the capacity at the arena where it was held. The president, who was reportedly “furious” over the embarrassing crowd size, was seen later that night walking off Marine One with his tie undone and a crumpled MAGA hat in his hand.
After View colleague Joy Behar jokingly said she’d seen a bigger crowd “at a Carrot Top performance in SoHo,” McCain declared that she had “so much to say” about the disastrous rally, noting that she had spent Saturday evening texting Behar and fellow co-host Sunny Hostin about it.
ADVERTISEMENT
“She loved it so much,” Hostin confirmed.
“I was, like, inject this into my veins,” McCain exclaimed. “The Trump campaign has been braggadocios, saying a million people were going to show up, and have 6,200 people show up, whatever the reasoning is... to say it was far below expectations is putting it very mildly.”
Referencing other notorious moments that have tormented other politicians’ careers, such Howard Dean’s scream, McCain claimed that the image of a downtrodden Trump after the rally “is going to stick with the American public.”
“Does he look confident in getting re-elected?” McCain continued. “No. He looks like a depressed person that realized maybe, just maybe the writing is on the wall right now, and this is the image that’s going to haunt the Trump campaign. They can spin this any way they want. Kayleigh McEnany was trying to spin it. Fox & Friends was not having it.”
She went on to say that she couldn’t believe that Trump’s handlers let him get off the helicopter looking like that before reiterating that this could be the moment where the “reality-show presidency” came to an end.
“Was it this weekend where the audience is over it?” McCain continued. “Where you want a new show? And I think maybe the American public with how serious COVID and the economy are, and how serious social unrest is, doesn’t want a reality-show anymore. And I was texting you this. This is the first time I think the writing could be on the wall for this. I don’t count him out, but this is bad news optically all the way around.”