ABC’s female-focused talkfest The View—whose fractious interpersonal relationships on and off the air have provided endless fodder for tabloid-ready gossip over the past two decades—seems poised to claim yet another casualty.
The show’s resident conservative Republican, Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Arizona Senator John McCain, is seriously considering calling it quits and not accepting ABC’s offer to return for The View’s 23rd season next September.
If this came to pass, it would be after two testy years of strident on-camera battles with her liberal-Democrat fellow panelists, Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin, and damaging leaks concerning her allegedly abusive and boorish backstage behavior.
According to sources close to the 34-year-old McCain, who is said to make something under a million dollars a year on the highly rated daytime program, she is emotionally drained, angry, and isolated—“feeling like a caged animal,” said one McCain intimate—amid a spate of negative publicity.
Much of this has appeared on the popular website of the Daily Mail that has portrayed her as entitled, unreasonable, “manic,” and self-obsessed—a “petulant child,” given to “crying fits” when she’s roasted on social media.
She feels “so exhausted and defeated,” said a knowledgeable source, after her two seasons of discontent.
“It’s getting to the point where it’s not worth the emotional toll every week,” said a McCain pal, who asked not to be further identified. “If she doesn’t stay at The View, she will find other work.”
McCain, who continues to grieve over her famous father’s August 2018 death from brain cancer but has been helped by therapy, declined an interview request from The Daily Beast, where she spent nearly four years as a regular columnist until late 2012.
“We don’t want people to attack Meghan. We’re happy to have Meghan there,” Hilary Estey McLoughlin, the show’s senior executive producer, told The Daily Beast. “I think she does want to be there. I think she wants to be on the show. She realizes it’s a very good platform for her and we love having her there. I feel like she will come back.”
However, as McLoughlin acknowledged, “these stories don’t seem to go away.”
“What happens with Meghan is that because she’s so passionate about what she’s talking about, and she feels very strongly that she’s carrying this mantle for the conservative perspective, and what she wants to talk about is so important to her, I think that’s the part that’s the most draining for her,” McLoughlin said.
Like her father, a salty-tongued former Navy pilot who was shot down over Hanoi during the Vietnam War and spent five years as a prisoner under torture, McCain is unusually self-aware, knows she comes on too strong for many people and occasionally offends them (although she is quick to apologize in private for missteps).
Yet even when she knows it would help her, she seldom practices tact and diplomacy. She “has a mouth like a trucker,” said a person familiar with McCain’s M.O. She “swears a lot.” She’s “got to stop, because it keeps impacting her life.”
Her father “raised her like a guy,” this person said, adding that she “feels different in every way a person can feel different [at The View]—everything from politically to just socially to where she’s from.”
In contrast to many of her colleagues, who spend weekends in the Hamptons, McCain likes to spend her time off at home in Arizona, “hanging out in the creek and doing Jell-O shots and shooting guns,” this person said.
In early May, when her husband, right-wing publisher and editor Ben Domenech, took to Twitter to hurl obscene and homophobic insults at Seth Meyers—after the former Saturday Night Live comic pressed McCain, a guest on his NBC late-night show, over her “dangerous” comments about Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar’s alleged anti-Semitism—she was hardly thrilled.
Her husband’s social-media behavior created more unwelcome heat and embarrassment for McCain, a high-profile supporter of LGBTQ causes.
With the passage of time, however, she’s much more appreciative of Domenech’s attempt at gallantry, said this person, who added that they were probably attracted to each other, in part, due to their common traits as loud-mouthed, impassioned “Alphas.”
Sadly, they got engaged to be married at the Mayo Clinic as her father was dying of glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. By the day of the wedding in November 2017, John McCain was too weak and ill to walk her down the aisle.
Compared to others who have held The View’s “conservative” seat over the past 22 years, notably Survivor alum Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Full House actress Candace Cameron Bure, “Meghan is bolder and more fearless in what she’s willing to say and how she challenges people,” McLoughlin said. “I think she sometimes feels isolated because she’s carrying this mantle and she takes it very personally. It’s a hard job. It’s the hardest job on the show, for sure.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: DailyBeast