A Never Trump Republican spoke about how conservative commentator Meghan McCain and her husband rejected her description of Trump supporters as being part of a “cult.”
Tara Setmayer, a contributor to CNN and ABC’s The View, criticized McCain and her husband, Ben Domenech, publisher of the online conservative magazine The Federalist, while speaking on a panel at an anti-Trump conference on Saturday in Washington, D.C., about the media’s effect on the public.
She accused Fox News, right-wing talk radio personalities, and others of misinforming President Trump’s supporters, whom she referred to as a “cult,” and lambasted other conservatives for defending them.
“You have millions of these cult followers, because it’s a cult. This has become a cult of personality. I’ve said this for three years now. I got into an argument with Meghan McCain on The View over this and stood my ground. She told me to stop saying that, it’s redundant. I said, ‘No, too bad. It’s the truth.’ She didn’t like that, and neither did her husband,” Setmayer said. She then looked into a camera recording the panel, addressing Domenech. “Hi Ben Domenech, if you’re watching this, yeah, we’re here.”
Setmayer was interrupted by Amanda Carpenter, another panelist at the conference and a former staffer to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “I don’t think we should be getting into fights with people on this,” Carpenter said, later attempting to shift the conversation.
“Can I just finish my point really quick since I was interrupted,” Setmayer said. “The reason why I said hello to Ben Domenech is because we were personally attacked for having this conference, because we’re standing on principle and we’re speaking the truth about what’s going on. I used that as an example because that’s what we’re up against.”
“They want us to be bullied into silence,” she said, adding anti-Trump conservatives should use social media to share their opinions. “Is principled conservatism dead? No, it’s not, as long as we’re not bullied into silence.”
In response to this report, Setmayer said she was not referring to McCain, only her husband. “To be clear, my comments about being bullied into silence had nothing to do with Meghan … I was referring to Ben’s direct attack on speakers like me and @Principles_1st summit on twitter,” she tweeted.
In 2018, McCain, the daughter of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, said it’s “reductive” to call Trump supporters cultists because she “understands” how they feel, despite her personal opposition to the president. McCain pressed Setmayer on her conservative beliefs, asking her, “So as a conservative, you’re mad about what’s happening on the Supreme Court and the two Supreme Court choices?” McCain asked.
“I don’t think it’s worth it,” Setmayer said. “I don’t think undermining democratic institutions, norms, and ideals to have someone like this, who’s dishonesty and unfit to be president, is worth it! No, I don’t!”
“I so enjoy Republican-on-Republican crime,” Joy Behar, a liberal host on The View, said of their argument.
McCain has been a vocal critic of Trump following his attacks against her father, who died in summer 2018 due to brain cancer, including Trump saying the elder McCain was “not a war hero.”
“It’s impossible to go through the grief process when my father has been dead 10 months is constantly in the news cycle because the president is so obsessed with the fact that he’s never going to be a great man like he was,” Meghan McCain said of Trump in 2019. She said the president “obsessing” over her father showed, in her view, the commander-in-chief had a “pathetic life.”
