“The View” co-host Meghan McCain took a shot Monday at veteran journalist Katie Couric over recent comments Couric made about how the country should view former President Trump’s supporters moving forward.
“I also think some of them are believing the garbage that they are being fed 24/7 on the internet, by their constituents, and they bought into this big lie,” Couric told Bill Maher earlier this month. “And the question is how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump.”
McCain, the lone conservative on “The View” and a frequent critic of Trump and his allies, said Couric’s comments were out of bounds. She said she had assumed that after President Biden’s victory, Democrats and others with public platforms would be calling for unity at a time of political unrest.
“Instead we’re hearing a lot of language from people like Katie Couric talking about Republicans like me need to be deprogramed, that we’re brainwashed — that 74 million Americans are basically irredeemable people, that we don’t need to communicate with or in any way have anything to do with,” McCain said. “I think it’s horribly dangerous for the country and I also think it’s horribly dangerous for Democrats. … Honestly, they can go to hell because I don’t need to be deprogrammed.”
She added that she has a “different perspective on how the government should be run.”
Leading voices in conservative media have seized on calls from some pundits and government officials about the importance of rebuilding trust in government and media following Trump’s relentless attacks on both institutions during his time in office.
Following a deadly riot by Trump supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Democrats have called for allocating more funding to fighting domestic terrorism and political or racial violence.
“The white supremacist cause is futile, it’s nihilist,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “Their world will never exist. That’s why we’re seeing violence right now. We have to pick up those pieces.”
In his inaugural address last week, President Biden made an appeal for unity and called on all Americans to place reemphasized value on provable facts rather than political spin.
“Politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war,” Biden said. “And we must reject a culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured. My fellow Americans, we have to be different than this. America has to be better than this. And I believe America is better than this.”