‘The View’ reportedly eyeing ex-Trump staffer Farah Griffin to replace Meghan McCain

Alyssa Farah Griffin, former director of strategic communications for the Trump administration, is reportedly in talks to replace Meghan McCain on “The View.”

On Tuesday, Variety reported that Farah Griffin is positioned to become the ABC program’s new conservative panelist. The casting news comes almost exactly a year after McCain appeared on her last episode of “The View” opposite co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin and Ana Navarro.

McCain served as the series’ conservative pundit for nearly four years before announcing her resignation. At the time, the daughter of late U.S. Sen. John McCain cited a desire to remain in Washington, D.C. — where she worked remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic — with her family.

According to Variety, Farah Griffin hasn’t officially signed a deal yet with ABC but will likely do so soon. The network is expected to announce her hiring in the coming weeks.

In a statement to The Times, an ABC spokesperson said, “We do not have a co-host announcement to make at this time. Stay tuned.”

Farah Griffin, who resigned from her White House post in December 2020, has appeared as a guest co-host on dozens of episodes of “The View” throughout its 25th season. She has also been working as a political commentator for CNN since her White House exit.

Working for the former president was “extremely challenging,” Farah Griffin said on an October episode of “The View.”

“But I strongly believe in public service. If a Democrat administration asked me to serve, if a Republican one did, I would say yes … I’m proud of what I did there. I always gave my best counsel to the president. Sometimes that meant being the skunk at the garden party … but that’s the job. … I went in knowing any day I could be fired … but my duty was to serve the American public and to serve the country. And I did my best.”

Earlier this month, the Daily Beast reported that comedian Wanda Sykes declined to appear on an episode of “The View” after learning that Farah Griffin was slated to guest host. The Daily Beast quoted an “insider” as saying Sykes “didn’t want to be part of helping a Trumper launder her reputation.”

Amid rumors of Farah Griffin’s casting, “The View” has received a cease and desist letter from Turning Point USA urging the show to “retract … defamatory statements” made about the conservative nonprofit organization earlier this week.

On Monday, “The View” co-hosts Behar and Goldberg slammed TPUSA’s Student Action Summit, held last week in Tampa, Fla. The panelists remarked on neo-Nazis gathering outside the event and hurling antisemitic slurs.

“The View hosts intentionally and falsely associated TPUSA with neo-Nazi protestors … placing TPUSA in denigrating and false light and negatively impacting its public perception,” the cease and desist letter read, according to Fox News.

“To be abundantly clear, TPUSA aggressively and completely condemns the ideologies of neo-Nazism and has zero connection to the protestors outside the event. Since these individuals were located on public property, TPUSA security attempted to, but was not permitted to remove them.”

The legal document demanded that ABC retract and apologize for the panelists’ statements by Wednesday, and Haines addressed the matter on Wednesday’s installment of “The View.”

“On Monday we talked about the fact that there were openly neo-Nazi demonstrators outside the Florida ‘student action summit’ of the Turning Point USA group,” Haines said. “We want to make clear that these demonstrators were gathered outside the event and that they were not invited or endorsed by Turning Point USA.

“A Turning Point USA spokesman said the group ‘100 percent condemns those ideologies and said Turning Point USA security tried to remove the neo-Nazis from the area but could not because they were on public property. Also, Turning Point USA wanted us to clarify that this was a Turning Point USA summit and not a Republican Party event. We apologize for anything we said that may have been unclear on these points.”