Meghan McCain has announced she’s leaving The View after nearly four years. The daughter of the late Republican senator John McCain who has openly and often combatively been the most conservative member of the five-person panel will leave the daytime political talkshow at the end of July.
McCain, 36, called the choice to leave the show she joined in October 2017 “not an easy decision” that “took a lot of thought and counsel and prayer” at the top of Thursday’s show. She attributed her decision to changes in her personal life following Covid and the birth of her first child, a daughter named Liberty, in September.
One of those changes was a move to Washington DC with her husband, Ben Domenech, founder of the rightwing website the Federalist, after the pandemic shifted production of The View away from the studio in New York. Citing the support system of friends and family available in the city, McCain said she “ultimately felt like I didn’t want to leave [Washington]”.
McCain also said that Covid “has changed the world for all of us. It’s changed the way I’m looking at my life, the way I’m living my life, the way I want my life to look like.”
During her four years on The View, McCain often found herself in the hot seat over her conservative stances, and sparred publicly with her co-hosts, particularly Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar. Her hostility toward the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Muslim Somali American, prompted the Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi to call her “the very definition of toxic femininity”.
But McCain had kind words on Thursday for her four co-hosts with whom she regularly tangled on such fraught topics as mask mandates and identity politics, calling Goldberg, Behar, Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines “the most talented women on all of television, hands down”.
“This is the show in America,” she added, “and it is not easy to leave but I feel like it is the right decision for me at this moment.”
The View was created by Barbara Walters in 1997. McCain has become the second longest-running conservative on the show after the Survivor contestant Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who was on the show from 2003 to 2013.
