To cleanse the palate. This takes me back to the golden age of “The View,” when the panel’s young conservative politico would spar regularly with its brassy left-wing comedienne from New York.

They won’t fully recapture the old magic, though, until one of the liberals starts mumbling about the “truth” behind 9/11.

This squabble originates, if you can believe it, from yet another Trump bon mot shared with the “Fox & Friends” team during his interview this morning. Actual quote:

When asked what he got the first lady for her 48th birthday, the commander-in-chief responded: “I better not get into that ’cause I may get in trouble.”

“Maybe I didn’t get her so much,” Trump said, before stumbling over his words, saying: “I tell you what — she has done … I got her a very beautiful card. You know, I’m very busy to be running around looking for presents, OK?”

Normally there’s literally nothing POTUS won’t boast about if invited to do so, often to comically exaggerated effect. It’s his whole shtick. Everything he owns is the best of its kind, he hires “the best people” to work for him, he’s the richest, the smartest, the most generous. And if you catch him off-guard by asking him a question he’s unprepared for, typically he’ll just play coy rather than say something that might disappoint the listener. When’s infrastructure week? Are we staying in Afghanistan? What about Russia sanctions? “Oh, you’ll see. We’re working on something very special, I can tell you that. It’ll be a gamechanger.” You know how it goes.

Yet when asked what he got his wife for her birthday, he doesn’t even make an effort. Just a card. No grandiose promises of lavish gifts, no coy hints about “something really special, the most special.” Just a card. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him so brutally honest.

Behar picks up on that, McCain goes ballistic, and hijinks ensue. Behar claims she was mocking POTUS, not FLOTUS, which is basically true, but she’s in that category of Trump critic whose contempt is so total and vocal that you suspect no one in his inner circle, Melania included, is exempt from it. McCain certainly reads it that way. What’s sort of interesting about this, though, isn’t the substance of the bickering itself but the fact that it’s yet another example of McCain and Behar getting into it on air. They blast each other a lot, and rarely in a friendly “two pals chewing the fat over politics” kind of way. There are endless variations of “McCain DESTROYS Behar over…” clips on YouTube, and curiously, many of them were posted within just the last two months. I think the match that lit the fuse was Behar saying in February that she didn’t like Republicans, which McCain understandably took personally, and it’s been all downhill since there. I’m sure we’ll be treated to the requisite “no, actually we’re good friends” PR crapola after this clip starts making the rounds but the two obviously and palpably don’t like each other. “The View” is fun again.