There have been many hosts to cycle through The View’s many years on the air, and not all of them have gotten along with each other or with their guests. In fact, there have been some pretty tense feuds. Read on to learn about two of the biggest behind-the-scenes (and on-screen) fights.
First we have Whoopi Goldberg, who opened up about The View after co-star Meghan McCain left the show in August 2021. The Sister Act star didn’t hold back.
Whoopi is ‘still tired’ after McCain’s exit in 2021
“It’s calmer, because nobody wants to be that tired every day,” Goldberg told Page Six. “I think [The View], it’s better. I feel it’s better, but I’m still tired!”
McCain, the daughter of the late Republican senator John McCain, has also commented on her tense working relationship with the Oscar-winning actress over her four years on the show. In her memoir Dirty Sexy Politics, she revealed, “I found her open disdain for me more and more difficult to manage as the years went on, and it became more frequent. Occasionally, if the show’s political discourse veered into a territory that she found disagreeable, Whoopi would cut me off, sometimes harshly.”
When asked for a comment on McCain’s book, Goldberg replied: “I’m trying to get my leg and my hip right. I don’t have time to think about anything but myself.”
McCain’s tense relationship with co-hosts led to her exit from The View
The View, created by groundbreaking journalist Barbara Walters in 1997, features six female hosts who discuss topics ranging from pop culture and celebrity gossip to some of the most heated and divisive political and moral dilemmas. When McCain first joined the show in 2017 after leaving Fox News, she consistently clashed with Goldberg and another cohost Joy Behar – an experience she has since labeled a “toxic work environment.”
McClain also talked about her relationship with Behar on “The Commentary Magazine Podcast” explaining an interaction with Behar after she returned to The View following the birth of her daughter Liberty in early 2021: “I finally went back to the show, and the day I went back to the show, Joy Behar said on air, ‘Nobody missed you, we didn’t miss you, you shouldn’t have come back.'”
“I was working on the show as the only conservative during the Trump years,” McCain told Variety in 2021. “I felt like a lot of people took out their anger on the administration on me because I was the only person in the building who was a Republican.”
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In one particularly heated episode in 2019, Goldberg famously told McCain to stop talking during a discussion about then-president Donald Trump’s impeachment.
According to McCain, Whoopi later apologized for her negative and dismissive tone. “I love Whoopi,” McCain shared in 2021. “I felt at a certain point she stopped respecting me, and it was hard.”
This was certainly not the first time tensions were heated on the show
Another of the most famous fights happened between Barbara Walters, who created the show in 1997, and Rosie O’Donnell. The two had known each other before O’Donnell’s appearance on the show between 2006 and 2007, but they got into it right before a 2006 taping.
Backstage, O’Donnell confronted Walters after Donald Trump, whom she has long been feuding with, published an open letter in The New York Post that said Walters had called him to “apologize for my behavior.” The letter also claimed that Walters said working with O’Donnell was like “living in hell.”
O’Donnell explained, “We got into an argument in the makeup room that day. I said, ‘I can’t believe that I haven’t heard from you during all of this time but that you’ve been communicating with him. Do you consider him your real friend, Barbara? I thought we had something real and something different than the way you’ve been treating me.'”
She said something about Walters’ daughter
The argument soon began to escalate, drawing the attention of others. “People were in shock because nobody talked to her like that. I said something about her daughter, which I shouldn’t have said,” revealed O’Donnell. “She was hurt. And we were live in 20 minutes.” The comment she’d made about Walters’ daughter was, in her words, nothing too bad: “I don’t know what kind of relationship you have with your kid.” But she still felt she shouldn’t have said it.
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Taping had to take place right after the argument, and O’Donnell recalled that the tension could be distinctly felt on that particular episode. Later, O’Donnell apologized “many times,” but she said that at the time, Walters’ actions against her really hurt. Barbara Walters was “one of the archetypal women that I grew up to and wanted to be around,” she said. “When I feel hurt by them, it feels much larger in the moment.”