"The View" co-hosts clashed over the current state of the Republican Party after its senators acquitted former president Donald Trump for the second time in a year.
Co-host Sunny Hostin wrote off the GOP as the "MAGA party, the QAnon party of the Confederate flag," and she blasted Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell for using his fading power as majority leader to push Trump's trial past Inauguration Day and then acquit him on a technicality.
"We all saw Mitch McConnell -- you're the reason why the trial happened after President Trump left, because you refused to start the trial while he was in office, you can't have it both ways," Hostin said. "But that's what he did and the Republican Party -- shameful, shameful, shameful -- stood and didn't mind that police officers were murdered, didn't mind that our democracy was attacked, didn't mind any of that, and that's what the Republican Party is today."
Co-host Meghan McCain didn't like that characterization of her political party.
"It's easy to say that the Republican Party is only the party of QAnon and all these things," she said. "If that's the truth, the Democratic Party is the party of socialism and cancel culture. You can burn down cities like Kenosha and it's fine. These are broad-stroke platitudes. The thing that I worry about right now is that we're not using our intrepid values to go forward and try to fight what's still good in this country and as long as we go back and forth on this there will be no resolution."
McCain pointed out that Trump still enjoyed broad popularity within the Republican Party, and she said that attacking him and his supporters as QAnon cultists would backfire -- even among Republicans who don't love the former president.
"Part of the problem is, for someone like me, when I hear that I automatically get tribal, and I'm like, well, I don't want the left," she said. "I'm the most intensely pro-life person that I know of, particularly on mainstream TV. I believe that abortion is murder, I believe that life begins at conception. I know that the opposite party says there are some people that don't agree with me, that think that abortion should happen up to late term. I think the idea that the Republican Party is just one swath is just -- it's just not nuanced, and the problem I have is the only way to become a good Republican is to become a Democrat, according to the media. I don't know what to do anymore because I can't keep going on TV and saying we're all Nazis."
Host Whoopi Goldberg agreed with Hostin, and said Republicans were responsible for letting conspiracy theorists and other fringe characters take over the party.
"The Republicans have brought this on themselves," Goldberg said. "They brought this view of them on themselves because the things that this former president has been supporting has not been good for the whole country, good for lots of folks but it's not good for everybody. You should be a little uncomfortable because we have sort of went through it and we're going to be going through this again."
McCain and Goldberg have clashed in the past over abortion, and the host once again made her view clear.
"When we talk about what you believe and what this one believes, the bottom line is, whatever decide to do as a woman with your body that should be between you and your doctor," Goldberg said. "That's what this all comes in about, but these are the same issues that we talk about all the time. Do you have the right to decide for me what I should do for my body? Some people say no. This is going to be conversation going on and on and on."
Goldberg steered her point back to Trump's GOP before heading into the commercial.
"But for me, the Republicans, you showed your faces, you said you were okay with everything that happened," she said. "You said it's okay and you opened the door for these people to continue to act poorly."
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