By the end of 2014, it was easy to forget that The View didn’t always cater to the day-drinking housewife demographic. The show that once radically reworked a women’s talk show by featuring star journalists such as Barbara Walters, Lisa Ling, and Meredith Vieira had devolved into a catty clown show.
In the three years following the departure of Walters, the intellectual and tonal anchor of the show, the table included at some point or another anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy, professional turncoat and ratings anathema Nicolle Wallace, a handful of actresses, and Rosie O’Donnell.
By the end of the 2016 election, all The View had really succeeded in was sending Donald Trump to the White House.
The show was ultimately saved from irrelevance by Meghan McCain, who ignited the chitter-chattering desk with the same streak of maverick fearlessness that allowed her father to rattle GOP leadership and the journalistic chops of a politico who spent her entire adult life in the eye of the arena.
McCain, who started the show in 2017, brought it to its six-year high by last fall. Now, for the first time in the show’s history, it’s the highest-rated show on daytime television.
And at the height of her influence, knowing full well she can set Twitter on fire with a single remark or hairstyle, McCain is leaving two seasons before the end of her contract with ABC. Given the toxic workplace McCain had to deal with, it’s unlikely The View can replace her at all.
McCain was tailor-made to occupy The View seat designated for the show’s lone conservative. Unlike Elisabeth Hasselbeck, McCain had the policy and political chops to match her passion, and she had a certain shamelessness the more mild-mannered Candace Cameron Bure and Abby Huntsman failed to muster.
McCain could never be accused of shilling for Trump, whose history of smearing her father long preceded his presidency. More importantly, she was one of the earliest Republicans to call out the earliest populist rot corroding the conservative movement.
McCain joined her father on the campaign trail after graduating from Columbia at 22 years old, and she never left the realm of politics. Although the door opened for her, as it does for all children of the ruling class, she quickly differentiated herself as a firebrand writer quick to slam Glenn Beck for calling her fat, endorse marijuana legalization, promote expanded access to sex ed and birth control while remaining ardently anti-abortion, and excoriate the “wingnuts” who “hijacked” the party after her father’s 2008 loss, mainly the ur-Palin populists who preceded what later became the dregs of Trump’s base.
But it wasn’t enough. McCain’s onion-thin-skinned co-hosts found that one of the most ardent and influential Trump critics on television still retained shocking fealty to conservative principles and a keen interest in actual reporting.
National Review’s David Harsanyi compiled the comprehensive summary of the most crucial questions McCain dared to ask.
To highlight a few: asking the former director of national intelligence James Clapper about the NSA’s mass data surveillance of citizens without a warrant; inquiring whether Brian Stelter thought CNN boss Jeff Zucker offering Trump campaign advice in 2016 was ethical; questioning Kamala Harris’s votes to defund the police; and challenging whether Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar’s radical abortion stances meant they would support Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s commitment to killing infants born alive during a failed third-trimester abortion.
For a time, it felt like not only was McCain the only journalist in the Acela corridor with the stones to ask 2020 candidates their actual stances on the issues that terrified the rest of the media, but also the only mainstream reporter in the country to call out scum such as the antisemitic Tamika Mallory and flash-in-the-pan #Resistance grifter Michael Avenatti.
She was an asset to the show, one neither too socially backward — McCain is an admitted blueblood up until, as a source once told the Daily Beast, she returns to Arizona and prefers “hanging out in the creek and doing Jell-O shots and shooting guns” — nor airheaded. But her colleagues savaged her anyway, putting the nail in the coffin of the show’s cultural relevance.
It wasn’t just the flagrant eye-rolling on screen but also the constant shivving off. The aforementioned Daily Beast report noted co-host Sunny Hostin followed Eli Valley after posting a vile caricature of McCain lampooning her support of Israel, an obvious dig not unnoticed by McCain’s camp.
Incidentally, the tabloids have littered Twitter feeds with endless screeds from “sources close to” Hostin and her colleagues. And when the masses came after McCain with personal attacks about her weight, something the proudly curvy McCain has always publicly embraced, or her husband (The Federalist founder Ben Domenech), hair, or patriotism, her colleagues failed to come to her defense.
I’ll tell you what’s happened in every national newsroom since McCain announced her departure: Some editor has pitched writing a piece of who should succeed McCain (contrary to the hopes of her haters, any piece about her draws a deluge of clicks), only for the peanut gallery to realize no such list exists.
It’s not that there aren’t conservative women with the chops to fit the bill. Before launching her own podcast, now picked up Sirius XM for a full-blown radio series, Megyn Kelly was an obvious candidate.
There are also plenty of TV-tested conservatives.
Fox News personalities such as Lara Logan, whose journalistic chops match those of the early days with Ling and Viera, would bring a vital air of seriousness to the desk. The network’s Britt Henry, formerly of ESPN, and Lauren Simonetti, a regular business host, could fill the obvious knowledge gaps of the desk with their specialization on top of general on-air skills.
Furthermore, there’s a world of untapped talent in alternative media. In a different world, The View tapping some Patreon phenom or rising podcast star for a quarter of the price needed to poach a traditional television personality would prove a win-win for both parties. But who in their right mind would replace McCain?
McCain came to the show with proven anti-Trump, anti-alt-right, anti-whatever bonafide the Left claimed was required for civil conversation. She cleared that bar and then some, and it still wasn’t enough.
She was treated like garbage, not just on the internet or on-air but also behind the scenes where even the tensest of political struggles are supposed to abate.
If McCain couldn’t get a fair shake, nobody else can. Anyone with the brain and charm to deserve a place on The View won’t lack the good sense not to reject it.
