The hosts of The View typically tape their Friday morning show on Thursday. But they were more than ready to go live after Thursday night’s debate and mostly came to the conclusion that the incumbent president should “step down,” as his performance was “stunningly worse” than expected.
While moderator Whoopi Goldberg declined to switch up her schedule to appear on a Friday like she did when Trump was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines, Ana Navarro, and Alyssa Farah Griffin were ready to carry the torch with spicy commentary.
Haines kicked off the conversation, calling the debate “hard to watch” and adding that Joe Biden should “step down if we want to defeat Donald Trump in November,” for “humanity, for his integrity, for his legacy.” She also said Democrats should “stop spinning” the age problem. Griffin—who previously worked as White House Communications Director in the Trump administration—agreed, adding that Biden should “put country before his own ambition and step aside and pass the baton.”
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“I’ve had concerns for a couple of years about Biden’s age,” Griffin also said, “[His performance] was stunningly worse than I expected.” Though she said, “Donald Trump was a mess—he lied his way through,” she also thought that “Joe Biden’s performance was so bad that it eclipsed everything that Donald Trump said.” She later quipped that she felt “duped”: “I feel like they told me [Biden] was doing back flips,” she said in reference to messaging from Biden’s camp about his mental and physical fitness.
Hostin agreed, adding, “Biden lost that debate. I think that is an accurate depiction of what happened—blame it on a cold, blame it on his stuttering, blame it on over-preparation, whatever, but he did lose. Maybe he needs to go, maybe he needs to be honest with himself and the American people.”
She said if Biden were to make room for a new Democratic nominee, “he could bow out with grace and dignity, [as] he has a record he can be proud of.” However, she pointed out the “irony” of Democrats calling for a new nominee and not Republicans. “I think it’s really ironic,” she said. “The party that should be pressuring their candidate to step aside is the Republican party.”
“Their nominee is a convicted felon—he’s facing hundreds of charges for criminal activity, and has been proven to be a racist, a business fraud, liable for sexual abuse, an insurrectionist, and as Biden said, ‘He has the morals of an alley cat,’” Hostin continued.
Though the calls for Biden to step down were pretty loud, Navarro remained convinced that Biden can still do this thing. “I never saw Joe Biden like I saw him last night. It is worrisome, [but] I’m not giving up on Joe Biden,” she said. “He looked elderly, he sounded elderly, he is elderly. [But] it is a very old man versus a very bad man,” she added, also pointing out that replacing Biden wouldn’t be “feasible.” Behar seemed to agree, pointing to a clip of Biden post-debate where he seemed more lively: “Suddenly no cold, suddenly he’s 63,” she said.
Unmoved, Haines doubled down on her earlier point that Biden isn't the best choice to defeat Trump. “If the Democratic voice pieces do not pivot, they will lose in November,” she said. “I hope that the people that love [Biden] will step in, because I guarantee you if that was someone I loved, I’d be up in his ear now.”
