Years after leaving The View, Meghan McCain has quite a few choice words for her replacement, Alyssa Farah Griffin.
“When I left The View, the executive producer said, ‘I want you to help me help pick your [successor],’” McCain, 41, said on a recent episode of her “Citizen McCain” podcast while reflecting on her 2021 exit from the daytime show. “[I gave] a list of women I thought would be great, including Allie Beth Stuckey.”
McCain went on to claim that the show “only won an Emmy twice in its history — one time is when I was there, for Best Political Show.” (The View has actually won more than 30 Daytime Emmys, none in a category titled Best Political Show.)
Before her exit, McCain said she wanted The View to find “someone who’s a real one” instead of hiring “fake people who once voted for President Bush in the early 2000s and now hate everything Republicans.”
“I’m gonna say something that’s a little nasty,” she added before referencing Griffin, 36, who previously worked in Donald Trump’s first presidential administration. “The person they replaced me with is a joke.”
She continued: “She is in no way representative of conservative women. It’s been a wildly disappointing experience for me to see what legacy I helped do during the four years there while my dad [John McCain] battled brain cancer and I had not one, but two miscarriages while I worked there.”
McCain also slammed Griffin as a “whatever” due to her past comments about voting for Kamala Harris in 2024.
“How is that representing conservatives?” she asked.
McCain joined ABC’s The View as a panelist during season 21 in 2017 as the sole conservative voice. After four seasons, McCain announced her departure from the show.
“This is going to be my last season here at The View. I will be here through the end of July to finish out the season,” she said on air in July 2021. “This was not an easy decision. It took a lot of thought and counsel and prayer and talking to my family and my close friends.”
She added: “I feel like this is just the right decision for me at this moment, and I just want to thank all of you. I’m eternally grateful to have had this opportunity here. So seriously, thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart, and I will still be here [for] a month, so if you guys want to fight a little bit more, we have four more weeks!”
McCain later opened up about her complicated experience on the show.
“I just didn’t know that when I signed to do this show that I [had] to deal with these crazy old people just yelling about me all of the time,” she said on her “Meghan McCain Has Entered the Chat” podcast in December 2023. “I go whole swaths of time without thinking about them — whole months without thinking about the show or anything. Apparently, I’m just on their minds every day. And it’s pathetic.”
