Meghan McCain announced she will be leaving ABC”s “The View” at the end of the season during Thursday morning’s episode.
“I am just going to rip the band-aid off,” McCain said. “I am here to tell all of you, my wonderful co-hosts and viewers at home: This is going to be my last season here at ‘The View.'”
“If you want to fight a little bit more,” she joked, “I’ve got four more weeks.”
.@MeghanMcCain announces her departure from @TheView at the end of the show’s season, saying “this was not an easy decision.”
“I’m just eternally grateful to have had this opportunity here so, seriously, thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart.” https://t.co/ZiP1UTs2xu pic.twitter.com/eLuEAJ4KLT
— The View (@TheView) July 1, 2021
McCain first joined “The View” in October 2017 and was co-host when the show won a Daytime Emmy Award for best informative talk show and saw its total viewer audience increase year to year.
McCain said her departure “was not an easy decision,” and “took a lot of thought and counsel and prayer, and talking to my family and my close friends.” She attributed her departure to her desire to spend more time at home in the Washington D.C. area with her husband and daughter.
“On a professional note,” said McCain, “this show is one of the hands-down greatest, most exhilarating, most wonderful privileges of my entire life.”
McCain, the daughter of decorated war veteran and Republican Sen. John McCain, said her late father encouraged her to take the job as host of “The View.”
“I didn’t want to join the show, as I talked about in the past,” she said. “It was my dad who encouraged me to do it. He said I should never give up an opportunity to work on such an iconic show and work with Whoopi Goldberg. He was right. It was one of the last things he told me to do.”
“Your dad was very smart,” Co-Host Whoopi Goldberg said. “He wanted you to be here with us because we could help toughen you up for what was coming: this wonderful baby you were going to have, and his departure.”
Sunny Hostin joked that the senator had warned her she would need to “learn to love [McCain] and understand her, and that she would be a pain in the a–, and he was right about all those things.”
McCain is known as the sole conservative voice on “The View,” which often sparked tension and viral clips between her and her fellow co-hosts. During her departure announcement, however, her co-hosts praised her.
Joy Behar, who McCain most frequently spars with on-air, said she was a “formidable opponent” and “no snowflake.”
“You and I have had our disagreements,” said Behar. “We’ve had our fights, but we’ve also had our drinking moments, which were rather interesting. … We’re on a show where we stick our necks out. We take the blowback. We take a lot of hits on this show, and we stick by our points of view. You have done that brilliantly for four years, and I hope you can say I’ve done the same thing.”
During “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen” in January, McCain told Cohen, “[my co-hosts and I] have to live and co-exist together just like Americans right now.”
ABC News released a statement saying McCain “brought her fierce determination and vast political knowledge and experience” to the show. “She recently came to us with her decision to depart the show at the end of this season, a difficult choice that she made for her and her family that we respect and understand.”
“We wish the best for Meghan as she plans her next chapter and thank her for the passion and unique voice that she shared with us and our viewers each day,” the statement read.
