Meghan McCain Appears On ‘Hannity’ To Talk “Toxic” Environment Of “The View’

Meghan McCain appeared on Fox News’ Hannity on Tuesday to talk further about her departure from The View, as she said that she was “targeted” as the “token conservative” on the show.

Host Sean Hannity opened the segment by playing clips from The View in which Joy Behar bluntly told McCain she did not miss her while she was on maternity leave, and another where Whoopi Goldberg told her to “please stop talking.”

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McCain, who has an audio memoir out called Bad Republican, said that she was treated differently on the show because of her politics.

“It’s all very personal,” McCain said. “That’s the thing that being a conservative woman in mainstream media is deeply threatening. Being a woman who can hold her own on a show like that proved to be ultimately threatening. So it became more and more personal. The stronger the show got — that was the ironic part of it, the better the show did. We won an Emmy. We were on the cover of The New York Times Magazine as the most important political show in America, I felt the toxicity got worse and worse. I actually felt like the more successful I was on The View and the more moments I helped get them, and the more I pressed liberal candidates and liberal guests on the show, the worse it got for me backstage.”

McCain said that Behar’s on-air swipe at her in January took place on her second day back following maternity leave.

“I had very severe post-partum anxiety, and that moment triggered a panic attack backstage. I vomited in my office. It was horrible. I started crying between commercial breaks, and it was the moment that I just thought that my fours in an anthropological experiment in left-wing media had come to an end.”

She added, “I really enjoyed four years on The View in the sense that it is a great challenge. It is a huge platform. People watch it. You are the number one show in daytime. But you are targeted if you are the token conservative and you are treated differently.”

McCain’s husband, Ben Domenech, is a Fox News contributor. McCain also recounted her experience in an interview with Variety that published on Tuesday.

The notion of liberal media bias or excess is like catnip for Hannity, and he peppered McCain with several questions about her experience. After playing the clips from The View, he said, “I’m just traumatized looking at it.”

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