There’s the day-or-night Facetiming; the text thread full of memes and funny tweets that one or the other has missed; that one bathroom conversation at dinner about whether or not Huntsman, 33, liked McCain’s new boyfriend (spoiler: she did — and then McCain, 35,married him).
And then there’s the hours and hours of advice given and received: No, don’t wear that bright blue jumpsuit on the air while pregnant; yes, I will feel that weird lump on your chest in case it’s something more serious. (Luckily it wasn’t.)
“I always say, ‘Everyone needs salt and pepper and you need them both together.’ You don’t just want the pepper and you don’t just want the salt.”
It’s practically a cottage industry trying to dissect who onThe View— the top-rated daytime talk show Huntsman and McCain, 35, co-host withJoy Behar,Whoopi GoldbergandSunny Hostin— likes who else, who is feuding with whom and who is trying to cut a hole out of their contract to use as an escape hatch.
McCain, the show’s most conservative voice, is also its most guarded host. She’ll tell you that. “This show nicknamed me ‘the Ice Queen,’ ” she says.
They tell this story about how they first became friends: Huntsman and McCain were both living in New York City and working at Fox News and Huntsman texted McCain, asking if she wanted to have a drink.
“I think it was my mom, she was like, ‘You and Meghan have so much in common, you guys have got to just connect,’ ” Huntsman remembers.
She was right.
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“And we said the day we got margaritas that we were never going to go low and be that and not support each other,” McCain says. No matter what.
“Since margaritas to now, she’s had three children, my dad died, I had a miscarriage, we work onThef——View,” McCain says, her voice sharpening just as it often does on the show — razor-like but not unaware of how her anger sounds and how to make it a little funny.
It’s true: It’s been ayearfor both Huntsman and McCain and to get through it they’ve relied, in part, on each other in different ways.
Huntsman warms McCain — breaks through her shell — and McCain will always tell Huntsman the truth. (And when there’s a conflict, Huntsman is the one knocking on McCain’s door, telling her they need to talk about it.)
“It’s good for me to give a little bit of me to her and her to give a little bit of me,” McCain says.
“I don’t want to be friends with myself,” Huntsman says. “I don’t want to be friends with someone that’s exactly like me, because you don’t learn as much.”
“You make me stronger,” she tells McCain.
And Huntsman was one of the first people McCain told about her recent pregnancy, which ended in a miscarriage, as sherevealed this summer.
“We were texting each other and I’m like, ‘I’m here for you,’ she’s like, ‘I’m here for you,’ ” Huntsman says. “And I’m like, Here we are, two women going through very scary things, very emotional things, and we can still — she was there for me, supportive and loving, no matter what she went through. And I think that told me so much about her as a person.”
“I know there are women, when they experience miscarriages, can’t be around pregnancy, which I totally get,” McCain says. But it was different for her: Huntsman “got pregnant right after my dad died. … I thought it was so beautiful: a reminder of the cycle of life.”
McCain, who says she and husbandBen Domenechare still trying to figure out whether they might try for more children, is especially connected to Huntsman’s youngest son, William.
“I was so sad throughout the whole thing and it just felt like so much darkness and sadness and then I remember going over to her apartment right after they [the twins] were born and I have a picture of him laying on me,” McCain says. “She was saying there’s actually something medical about babies laying on you — nurturing and soothing.”
“Skin to skin,” Huntsman interjects.
They both know they’re in a brighter-than-normal spotlight, given how President Donald Trump has fueled interest in politics — and the ratings ofThe View, where Trump is a nearly daily topic.
And this brings us to Trump’s oldest son,Donald Trump Jr., and Don Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle. The coupleappeared on Nov. 7 onThe View, for the first time ever, ostensibly to promote Don Jr.’s new book,Triggered.
Lou Rocco/ABC via Getty
Instead, he and Guilfoyle, an adviser to the president’s re-election campaign,sparred with the hostsabout impeachment, the Bidens and President Trump’s divisive style. Huntsman led the questioning, pressing Don Jr. about why he revealed the alleged name of the government whistleblower at the center of the impeachment investigation into President Trump.
McCain’s father, the late Sen.John McCain, has been a favorite target of the president’s even after the lawmaker’s death from brain cancer last year.
She did not speak during Don Jr.’s appearance onThe View— save for one segmentwhere she told him, “Mr. Trump, a lot of Americans in politics miss character, and a lot of people miss the soul of this country. You and your family have hurt a lot of people and put a lot of people through a lot of pain, including the Khan family, who is a Gold Star family that I think should be respected for the loss of their son. Does all of this make you feel good?”
Huntsman tells PEOPLE she and McCain “talked a ton” ahead of that interview. Beforehand, McCain told her, “I really need you on this one.”
“You had every reason to want to get it right,” Huntsman tells McCain in their PEOPLE interview. (For the record, they say they didn’t interact much, if at all, with Don Jr. or Guilfoyle while off-camera.)
“I had a really hard time with the Don Jr. interview, really hard,” McCain says. “And I just was asking for advice afterward.”
“It was tough for everybody, but it wasn’t like we were sitting there calling people names,” Huntsman says.
She also gives Huntsman credit for her questioning in an ABC News interview withIvanka Trump, the president’s oldest daughter and a senior aide.
Huntsman and McCain have talked about the idea of a podcast together as a way to have more in-depth conversations with interview subjects.
“We have a lot of friends that are Democrat, Libertarian, whatever anyone wants to be. It’s not contentious,” Huntsman says.
The times being what they are though, with divisions widening and tempers flaring, they say they feel out of step with a Republican Party (and, in a way, politics at large) that is more interested in conflict than conciliation.
“Now, we’re in this place where we’re like, ‘We don’t fit in,’ ” Huntsman says, “‘We can’t even have conversations.’ ”
source: people.com
