At the time, McCain said on the air when announcing her departure, “I am just gonna rip the Band-Aid off. I am here to tell all of you, my wonderful co-hosts, and my thew at home that this is going to be my last season here on The View.” It had long been apparent to The View viewers that McCain was sort of a black sheep among her fellow panelists; she frequently championed opinions that were in diametric opposition to her co-hosts’ perspectives. McCain’s debate style could also rub people the wrong way, particularly Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar. And while Goldberg warmly told McCain during her resignation speech, “It has been quite wonderful to sit across from you,” Behar’s on-camera, non-verbal reaction was… something else! McCain said on the July 1 episode that a desire to be closer to family alongside husband Ben Domenech was the impetus behind her leaving. “This decision has taken a lot of thought and counsel… COVID has changed the world for all of us. And it changed the way, at least for me, the way I am looking at life, the way I am looking at living my life, the way I want my life to look like,” she explained. “I came to the D.C. area [while pregnant amid the pandemic] which is where my husband and I have always split time and it’s where I grew up splitting time and we have this incredible life here. We’re surrounded by my family, his family, by friends… I felt like I didn’t want to leave.” While McCain has long been known to frequently butt heads with her View co-hosts, as recently as a few months before her exit, she insisted that she wasn’t stepping down. So what happened to make McCain change her mind—and which of her co-workers upset her most with their on-air treatment of her? Keep reading to find out why Meghan McCain says she left TheView.
Why did Meghan McCain leave TheView?
“The way I’d been treated on the show as the resident conservative, particularly upon my return from maternity leave, had made it impossible for me to stay,” McCain claims in Bad Republican. “The atmosphere of The View breeds drama: producers can’t control hosts, manage conflict or control leaking. My take on the show is that working at The View brings out the worst in people. I believe that all the women and the staff are working under conditions where the culture is so f***ed up, it feels like quicksand.” She continues, “I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because there’s no high-level oversight of the show from the network. ABC won’t lay down the law when it comes to conduct at The View. We’re like the network’s crazy cousin. HR reports seem to fall on deaf ears, starting from years before I worked there. And as a result, people—both on camera and off—feel empowered to act however they like, and do whatever they want. In my four years there, I was the target of plenty of shade—too much to even begin to recount—and then I also experienced more toxic, direct and purposeful hostility.”
Was Joy Behar why Meghan McCain left The View?
McCain recounts in Bad Republican that on her second day back at work after giving birth to daughter Liberty, Behar told her on the air, “I did not miss you. Zero.” In response, McCain felt that “nothing anyone has ever said to me on camera since I have been giving interviews since I was 22 years old ever hit this hard. I felt like I’d been slapped.” She added that what Behar blurted out felt especially shocking because during her maternity leave, Behar had “texted me to ask to see a baby picture of Liberty, and she’d seemed happy for me. We’d chatted in a friendly way. I believed that, despite all our differences, deep down, we had a mutual understanding of respect for each other.” That episode seemed to be the straw that broke McCain’s back. “I felt like in that moment I took a look at my life outside of myself and I thought clearly—this s**t isn’t worth this,” she says. “Nothing in life is worth this.”
Did Whoopi Goldberg get Meghan McCain fired from TheView?
No; McCain makes it clear she definitely left of her own accord, but she also states plainly that she felt hurt by Goldberg’s actions over the years. “When I first joined The View in 2017, I felt a connection to Whoopi,” McCain admits. “She had made a promise to my father that she would look after me, and she kept her word for the first two years that I was on the show. The thing about Whoopi, though, is that she yields so much power in culture and television, and once she turns on you, it can create unfathomable tension at the table. I found her open disdain for me more and more difficult to manage as the years went on and it became more frequent. Occasionally, if the show’s political discourse veered into territory that she found disagreeable, Whoopi would cut me off, sometimes harshly. Once, in the middle of a heated debate on live TV, Whoopi singled me out and said, ‘Girl, please stop talking right now.’ It instantly trended on Twitter. And it really hurt… Day after day, week after week, these things take a toll.”
Who are the current hosts of The View?
Right now, Goldberg, Behar, Sara Haines and Sunny Hostin are co-hosting TheView, with a rotating cast of guest panelists (all of them notably Republicans) filling in for McCain, including Condoleezza Rice, Gretchen Carlson, Mia Love, Carly Fiorna, S.E. Cupp and more.
When did Meghan McCain join The View?
McCain was a View panelist for four years, first signing on as a co-host in the fall of 2017. Prior to that, the 36-year-old conservative firebrand had worked at MSNBC and Fox News. Next, relive Jenny McCarthy and Sherri Shepherd’s tearful departures from The View.
