Meghan McCain is tired of being asked about The View.
The late Arizona senator John McCain’s daughter and former host complained that she is being “harassed” about a potential return to the show. Former View host and Trump nemesis Rosie O’Donnell revealed that the popular daytime series will bring back former hosts to celebrate its 30th anniversary season—but McCain declared she will not be one of them.
“I am in the middle of trying to pack my 6th-month-old baby for a family trip, and a Page Six reporter who has constantly harassed me personally for years is apparently attempting to write an article about my time at The View,” she wrote in the post.
The conservative pundit sat on the show’s main cast from October 2017 to August 2021, and left after multiple confrontations with her co-hosts.
“As I have expressed explicitly, that was a very painful time in my life both personally and professionally,” McCain continued. “This addiction that both the show and gossip reporters have with harassing current and ex-hosts continues to be insane. I truly wish that culture would change.” She concluded, “I ask only to be left alone and have no desire or plans to ever return to the show.”
Despite her own tumultuous past with the show, O’Donnell revealed that she would return. “I will go on the 30th anniversary next year...in whatever way they want me just as a guest,” O’Donnell said. She added, “They’re bringing back all the hosts, I think, for the 30th season.” The plans appeared not to be set in stone, however, as her representative told Entertainment Weekly after the reveal, “There has not been a formal ask from the show at this time.”
The rep added that current host Ana Navarro mentioned something to O’Donnell about coming to Season 30 of The View “as a guest,” but that “nothing has been formalized.” O’Donnell, who now resides in Ireland to escape Trump’s second presidency, is set to return to TV as a temporary guest host for Jimmy Kimmel Live the week of August 17.
McCain has had plenty to say about the show and its hosts since her exit, but credited O’Donnell with trying to “warn” her about joining its cast.
O’Donnell co-hosted the show from 2006 to 2007 and 2014 to 2015. “I know she’s in Ireland and has sort of banished herself from America,” McCain said of O’Donnell last March, but “I always had really great interactions with her, for whatever that’s worth.” She added that O’Donnell was “actually the first person that warned me that The View was a cesspool.”
The Citizen McCain podcaster has called Alyssa Farah Griffin, her conservative replacement on the show, “a joke,” and the rest of the cast “s---ty and undisciplined.”
