As a conservative co-host of The View, Meghan McCain often finds herself at odds with her more liberal colleagues across the table.
Such was the case when Sunny Hostin echoed the growing calls for media to stop airing President Donald Trump's daily briefings regarding the global pandemic, due to a constant flow of misinformation and tangential diatribes that can't be fact checked in real time.
McCain disagreed, but not for the reasons one might think.
Watch below.
Should Trump Press Briefings Be Televised Live? | The Viewwww.youtube.com
McCain wanted Trump's press conferences so that Trump's totalitarian tendencies would be front and center:
"I think we're at a place where President Trump, he's always been a sort of totalitarian President in a way that we've never historically seen before. My fear is that he's going to play on the American public's fears in a draconian way and possibly do something akin to the Patriot Act going forward where he uses this moment in time to play off our fears for his own benefit."
McCain cited the Patriot Act, which broadly expanded surveillance and detainment powers to an unconstitutional level in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
McCain also invoked the President's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, whose comments that federal emergency stockpiles weren't intended for states recently sparked backlash:
"I, for one, became even more fearful of what was happening when I saw how inept Jared Kushner was."
She then brought it back to Trump and her main argument:
"My fear is that this is a moment of time that can be manipulated by our powers and by the government in place, and I want to see front and center what he's saying no matter how ridiculous some of the press commentary ebbs into."
People tended to agree that Trump isn't above using a pandemic to harness public fear for his benefit.
McCain's hypothesis isn't unfounded.
The President's victory in 2016 was largely due to fear he drummed up within the Republican base: a fear of undocumented immigrants, of a deep state, of his Democratic opponent, and skepticism of the media and anyone who disagreed with him—McCain's father among them.
Some of the people who fell for this fear criticized McCain for speaking against their leader.
Stay vigilant.
The book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America is available here.
