In her new audio memoir, Bad Republican, Meghan McCain alleges that Whoopi Goldberg and other staffers of The View took out their anger at the Trump administration on her.
McCain left the long-running talk show in July, calling her four years as the resident Republican pundit “one of the hands-down greatest, most exhilarating, wonderful privileges of my entire life” during her on-air goodbye. Three months later, in an excerpt of the memoir published
by Vanity Fair, she’s telling a different story.She now recounts a toxic onset experience, especially in the wake of the Trump election, with original co-hosts Goldberg and Joy Behar making her job increasingly difficult.
“As the country got worse under Trump, the treatment from Whoopi, Joy, and some of the staff grew meaner and less forgiving,” she says. “It was as if I had become an avatar for everything they hated about the president. It felt like the cohosts and staff only knew one Republican—me—and took out all their anger on me, even though I didn’t even vote for Trump.”
Timed with her father’s John McCain‘s 2018 death and her daughter Liberty’s birth in late 2020, McCain insinuates that this unbearable work environment was the reason she chose to opt out of her contract at ABC two years early.
Over the last two years, The View
has made headlines several times due to on-air squabbles between McCain and her senior co-hosts, as she fiercely debated her opposing opinions on subjects ranging from the Biden administration to identity politics. Yet despite the fact that she also often clashed with guests on The View including Lavar Burton and Stacy Abrams, she maintains that she was not the cause of on-set tension.Instead, she says, it was the result of Goldberg “turning on her.”
“I found her open disdain for me more and more difficult to manage as the years went on and it became more frequent,” she shares in the book.
Many on Twitter called McCain out for her whiny ways.
Bad Republican will be available exclusively on Audible beginning Oct. 21