A discussion on Tuesday morning’s episode of The View about the lies surrounding President Donald Trump’s upcoming campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma quickly devolved into a brutal back-and-forth about who deserves more blame for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
While three of the show’s co-hosts denounced the Trump campaign’s decision to hold a massive rally at an indoor arena with no social-distancing guidelines, Meghan McCain said the Black Lives Matter protesters were just as big a problem.
“You’re inviting 60,000 people to a rally where masks are optional, where they very well may be infected with a life-ending virus,” Sunny Hostin said of Trump’s rally. “I just think he’s a menace to citizens. It’s despicable.”
ADVERTISEMENT
But after Joy Behar warned Trump supporters that “he doesn’t care about your health or your children’s health,” McCain offered up her counterpoint.
“Do you think Chris Cuomo cared about people’s health when he moved old people around to nursing homes that were COVID-positive and a lot of people died including my friend Janice Dean’s mother-in-law and father-in-law?” McCain asked, mistakenly naming the CNN host instead of his brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. “There’s a lot of hypocrisy to go around here, and this is one of the issues that I’m really enraged about.”
“I don’t think anyone should be in giant rallies right now, because we’ve been told by medical experts that it’s not safe,” she continued. “But the message from the media is as long as you are protesting something or going to a rally that is of the right politics you can do it and we're going to ignore the spread of COVID. So going to a Trump rally is somehow more dangerous than going to a rally in Brooklyn over the weekend?”
“Is COVID a pandemic that we all have to stay sheltering-in-place and inside or is it not?” McCain asked. “Or is it only a pandemic if you are a conservative and you’re a Trump supporter and then you’re a hypocrite if you sign this waiver and you go into his rally, but you’re not a hypocrite if you protest someplace else? It’s very confusing!”
When her co-hosts pushed back, McCain reminded them that she’s “no Trump fan” but feels like “you make me defend him when you say he wants people to die.” She proceeded to make the debate about herself by saying, “I’ve been in quarantine just like everybody else or sheltering-in-place for the past three and a half months, and I still can’t buy a crib for my child in person. And there are people out there everywhere protesting and going to Trump rallies!”
After a break, Behar calmly explained that there is a difference between people voluntarily protesting outside against police brutality and the Trump campaign inviting them into an indoor arena and forcing them to sign a waiver that says they won’t sue if they get sick. “The indoor situation is 10 times worse and much more dangerous. That’s all. It’s completely different.”
“The average Trump supporter is not going to see any difference between any rally anywhere in the country and the rally they’re doing there,” McCain shot back. “I wouldn’t go to either, because I think it's unsafe because of the COVID virus. And that’s my take. But there’s a lot of hypocrisy going around.”
But moments later, she was back to her own story.
“I’m worried this is the new normal, like a lot of Americans, that I’m never going to be in the studio with you guys, that I’m never going to be able to go into a baby store,” said McCain, who reportedly fled her New York home for Virginia weeks ago. “And I know I keep bringing it up, but when you waited as long as I did to have a child and now I don’t know if I’m ever going to buy a crib in person, it’s something that’s been hard.”
“And that’s just a tiny thing,” she continued. “And I’m not saying it's anywhere near the sacrifices so many millions of Americans are making that are much more intense. People have lost their lives, people have lost their jobs. But this is very hard and it seems to be no end in place. So that’s where my frustration is coming from.”
