Donald Trump mocked The View co-host Meghan McCain for what he described as her getting “fatter,”

If crossing Trump was an easy way for a pundit to wind up on the butt-end of his crass, tabloid-like media obsession, so too, it turned out, was simply being related to one of his perceived foes. The leader of the free world, it turns out, has come to the conclusion that Meghan M. McCain, the daughter of the president’s late archrival Sen. John McCain, is, to put it in terms he’d likely have to look up in Webster’s, not to his aesthetic or intellectual liking.

During a hectic stretch of days in March 2019, not long before Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s hotly anticipated report was finally delivered to the Department of Justice, President Trump couldn’t or wouldn’t stop picking fights with the late Sen. McCain, despite—or perhaps because of—the near-universal reverence accorded the Senate veteran and Vietnam War hero in the wake of his passing.
The president—on social media, while talking to journalists, and onstage in Ohio—renewed his attacks on McCain as a backstabber, a Trump hater, a deep state enabler, and a classroom dunce at Annapolis.

Meghan McCain responded from her perch hosting The View on ABC by calling the president’s life “pathetic” and small compared with her dad’s. “I don’t expect decency from the Trump family,” she said during the March 21, 2019, episode.

When the notoriously media-obsessed president caught wind of Meghan’s comments, he picked up the phone at the White House and began calling longtime friends to see if they’d join in on his cathartic minutes of hate against the McCain daughter and other enemies real and perceived.“She’s been getting fatter?” Trump asked, before launching into a harangue about how she is somehow “dumber” than her father. One confidant to whom the president vented his grievances about the McCain family described a diatribe that lasted at least a minute and a half during which the president spoke without interruption. This person at one point put the phone on mute, hit the speakerphone button, and allowed others present to hear President Trump bash Meghan McCain’s cheeks and, to the president’s eye (ever attuned to the basest aspects of entertainment and cable news), her waistline.

During the conversations, he aggressively fixated on what an awful TV host she was, both on The View and during her time as a Fox News contributor. He wondered why anyone would want to hire her. He rambled on and on about how nobody would care about who she was or what she had to say, if not for the genetic proximity to Sen. McCain.

This was said without a hint of self-awareness, given the forty-fifth president’s last name, the cushy White House jobs afforded to his daughter and son-in-law, the interventions on their behalves when they were unable to secure government security clearances, and the nepotism undergirding Trump’s own rise in New York real estate, to say nothing of the well-maintained fortunes of Tiffany, Eric, Don Jr., and so forth.

It also offered a window into how the president prioritizes his time, his energy, and his grievance-mongering. That week, Trump had just announced he was nixing the long-standing American policy on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, declaring “it is time” for the United States to “fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty” over the area.

Shortly thereafter, Trump was back working the phones, bitching about Meghan McCain’s weight to fellow members of a Trump-era ruling class.

And it wasn’t the first time he’d maligned the appearance of a television news host. It wasn’t even the first time he’d done so for one of the women on The View.

“She’s a slob, she talks like a truck driver,” Trump, then in his reality-TV phase, told The Insider during a 2006 interview at his office, speaking of Rosie O’Donnell toward the end of the George W. Bush era. This was during “Rosie’s” brief stint as a controversial, Bush-loathing View co-host, when Trump and O’Donnell began feuding publicly, replete with Trump’s prolific legal threats.

“How does she even get on television?... If I were running The View, I’d fire Rosie. I mean, I’d look her right in that fat, ugly face of hers, and say, ‘Rosie, you’re fired,’” he continued in his rant to The Insider. It would alarmingly mirror his broadsides made more than a decade later against, for example, world leaders and diplomats. “We’re all a little chubby, but Rosie’s just worse than most of us. But it’s not the chubbiness; Rosie is a very unattractive person, both inside and out. Rosie’s a person that’s very lucky to have her girlfriend. And she better be careful, or I’ll send one of my friends to pick up her girlfriend. Why would she stay with Rosie if she had another choice?
“She’s trying to use ABC and The View to get even with me. But with me, we fight back,” Trump said. “I’ll probably sue Rosie… It would be fun. I’d like to take some money out of her fat-ass pockets.”

Trump dramatically concluded, “Rosie… is a loser.”

Everything you need to know about Trump, the president and the celebrity and the lump of flesh, is contained in that Rosie clip. It’s a decoder ring just waiting to be picked up and utilized by every establishment-media dipshit who ever earnestly asked himself or herself, “Isn’t this beneath the dignity of the Oval Office?” It sure is! This is Trump when the cameras turn off, when staff depart the Oval Office and he’s left to work the phones with friends and allies and muse about the losers and haters polluting his airwaves, and the ugly faces and large waistlines that he can’t believe are on television but nonetheless can’t stop talking about.

Years later, The View co-host Abby Huntsman, a former Fox News anchor and the daughter of the former Republican presidential contender Jon Huntsman, also caught President Trump’s eye for physical detail and examination. Though this case was markedly more lustful and less scornful than his assessment of the McCain daughter.

On June 1, 2018, Kim Yong Chol, a senior North Korean official and confidant of the totalitarian ruler and Trump’s buddy Kim Jong Un, was in town to visit the U.S. president at the White House as the two governments continued down the path of ostensible negotiations on the future of nukes on the Korea Peninsula. During his high-profile swing through Washington, D.C., the official conversed with Trump for hours and delivered a personal letter to the president from the North Korean dictator himself. In remarks to reporters on the White House South Lawn following that meeting, Trump was buoyant, lauding the “very nice letter.”

To mark the occasion of this visit and diplomatic love letter, the White House invited some of the administration’s top brass to powwow and socialize with the excitable Donald that same week. The elder Huntsman, one of the GOP old guard’s many Civility Preachers and by this point Trump’s ambassador to Russia, was one of those dignitaries invited by the White House to shake his new boss’s hand and kiss the ring for good measure.

Jon Huntsman made the mistake of bringing along a plus-one: his spouse.

As Huntsman and Trump glad-handed in the West Wing, the ambassador’s wife captivated Trump’s attention. For a moment, Trump locked eyes with Mary Kaye, a blond, gorgeous, self-possessed, and Kennedy-esque-looking force in the room. He glanced her up and down.

“Now I know how Abby lost all her baby weight so fast!” a smirking Trump said to compliment the proud grandparents.

For a split second, the Huntsmans didn’t know exactly what to make of the president’s passive lechery and his comment about their daughter Abby or her appearance.

Soon enough, though, they put two and two together. In one short sentence, the president had managed to ogle both the daughter and the wife of one of his most important diplomats.