Meghan McCain Is Kind of 'Grateful' Trump Is President: Otherwise, 'I Don’t Think I Would Be Successful' on The View

Meghan McCain is not a fan of President Donald Trump — just ask her — but she’s “grateful” to him for one thing.

“If Trump wasn’t president, I don’t think I would be successful here,” the View co-host said in a new book on the show, Ladies Who Punch, which was published last week.

“For that reason, I guess I’m grateful that Trump is president,” McCain continued. “It’s just made my job a little easier because I know why it happened.”

Still, McCain, 34, told author Ramin Setoodeh (her friend and former editor) that she didn’t think the president — an unusually polarizing politician — was the reason The View had drawn strong ratings.

“That I don’t concede to. Everyone is like, ‘Oh, you’re popular because Trump.’ I think everyone is more interested in politics,” she said. “Young women are different now than when I was younger. Everyone is involved, civically engaged, and informed. I think that’s also why the show is doing so well.”

“I think the reason I worked and other Republicans didn’t is because I’m the first real Republican that they hired,” McCain said.

And she knows how that sounds: “Yes, I think I’m more of a Republican than Elisabeth is.”

Speaking with Setoodeh, she could hardly name other conservative co-hosts before her: “Nicolle Wallace changed parties. Candace Cameron was a social conservative. I don’t remember the other people who were on here.”

Since joining The View in October 2017, McCain has often the panel’s most conservative voice and its most visible Trump critic, especially as the president has continued to disparage her father, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, who died of brain cancer last summer.

“He [Trump] knows it and I know it and all of you know it — he will never be a great man,” Meghan said on the show last month. “My father was his kryptonite in life, he’s his kryptonite in death.”

Describing her own politics, Meghan has described herself as “a conservative first and foremost.”

“I’m a small government, America-first conservative,” she said on The View in February. “What is being presented to me on the alternative side is too radical for me.”

In Ladies Who Punch, she compared that certainty of belief to others who had come and gone on the show.

“I was born in this environment. I don’t want to be a Democrat,” she said. “I think there were a lot of people they hired that are in the mushy middle, or they are Republicans who are ashamed of being Republicans — or they are intimidated.”

Meghan told Setoodeh she was somewhat reluctant to take The View job, given its history of getting rid of hosts who aren’t working out. But her father “convinced me to do it.” (A call to View moderator Whoopi Goldberg also helped: “I called her before I accepted,” Meghan said. “I asked her if she thought I could do this.”)

And while she said she “thought I was getting fired for a long time,” she’s been happy to be proven wrong.

“I hope it’s in my obituary that I was the first Republican since Elisabeth Hasselbeck to survive more than one season on The View,” she said. “It’s one of my proudest moments.”

That includes her noted verbal altercations with fellow panelist Joy Behar.

“I love sparring with her,” Meghan said in Ladies Who Punch. “We’re like boxers; we punch gloves and then we’re out.”