With Joy Behar self-isolating at home and Whoopi Goldberg appearing via satellite, The View table is getting a lot less crowded, and co-host Sunny Hostin is stepping forward as the harshest critic of President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
On Thursday morning, the show shared a clip of Trump boasting about his decision to ban travel from China before declaring, “I look at it, I view it as, in a sense, a wartime president. I mean, that's what we're fighting.”
“He’s right to call this a war, is he not?” Goldberg asked the panel.
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But while fill-in host Sara Haines said that “if we need to call it war” to get people to take it seriously then she doesn’t care what Trump calls it, Hostin disagreed.
“I think people are now at a point now where they're realizing the severity of the situation, but I'm very uncomfortable with this president saying that he is a wartime president,” Hostin said. “Because in my view, last week he said he wouldn't take any responsibility for the significant delay in the country's coronavirus testing capabilities,” she added, referring to the most damning statement from Trump’s Rose Garden press conference last Friday.
“And you have a president who is notorious for being a draft dodger when it came to Vietnam and, you know, getting these bone spur deferments,” she continued. “And to sort of reframe his legacy when it comes to the coronavirus response as a wartime president, I'm very uncomfortable with. Because wartime presidents take responsibility for their failures and he has been unwilling to do that.”
When her co-hosts started to push back, Hostin said, “I think he's a liar-in-chief and I refuse to give him the moniker of a wartime president. He doesn’t deserve that.”
“I don’t think it’s about what he deserves or not,” Meghan McCain replied. “I think it’s the reality of the world we’re living in.”
