The hosts of The View are still clashing over Donald Trump, but this time it was the panel’s two Republican hosts who were at odds over whether to fall in line or keep the pressure on the president-elect.
“I root for America, so I root for a smart, serious Donald Trump presidency,” former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin said Monday, “and I root for push back when he doesn’t do things that are smart and serious.”
Former Republican strategist Ana Navarro took issue with the change in Griffin’s tone about a second Trump presidency, after she’d joined them (with firsthand knowledge as a former aide) in telling America that Trump was “unfit.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“I spent weeks telling people that he was apocalyptic, I’m not going to change now,” Navarro said, taking a jab at Griffin. “He is still the same man. I think that’s when we lose credibility.”
Whoopi Goldberg offered a more neutral stance, sharing that she would hold off on further hand-ringing about the president-elect before he’s sworn in: “I think what we’re all saying is we’re gonna sit and watch, we’re going to wait and see. Because we can’t do anything else—”
Navarro interrupted, shutting down Goldberg’s point: “I’m not gonna wait and see,” she said with a suspicious look. “I mean this guy has told us [he wants] retribution, he’s going to be a dictator on day one.”
After Griffin and Goldberg asked what she could possibly “do” before Trump made any of the moves he’d promised he would on the campaign trail, Navarro clarified, “What I’m saying is, I have no false expectations that at 78, he’s going to all of a sudden [be different in office].”
“No one does,” Griffin shouted back, even though she had just said she hoped that Trump would be “smart and serious” in contrast to her past comments about him. “Treating everything like a five-alarm fire doesn’t help,” she said in defense.
Goldberg seemed to agree with Griffin, although from a less Trump-friendly standpoint, when she said, “There’s nothing to be done until you know what you’re fighting. It’s—pissin’ in the wind doesn’t help. You just get a wet face.”
Griffin, a lifelong Republican just like a Navarro, has been staunchly anti-Trump throughout her time on the show, and later revealed that she’d voted for Kamala Harris. She readily declared that she was “still a Republican” whenever given the chance.
“I’m shying away from this apocalyptic, ‘It’s all, we need to be like losing sleep over [Trump’s every move],’” Griffin also said on the show.
Not panicking before anything happens is one thing Goldberg and Griffin agreed on, but the former expressed her doubt in Griffin’s hope that a second Trump term would be better than the first.
“I think all those things are great to dream about,” Goldberg said. “And I wanna be really clear ‘cause you know how [the media] like to always pit us [against one another]. I understand all the things you wanna see him be,” she told Griffin directly, but “I understand all the things that he promised he would be and he wasn’t.”
