On Friday’s episode of The View, Whoopi Goldberg broke her longstanding rule about never saying Donald Trump’s name, as the hosts enthusiastically discussed the former president’s historic conviction on 34 felony counts.
“I’m going to say something you’ve never, ever heard me say before: Donald John Trump is a convicted felon,” Goldberg said at the top of the episode.
In 2018, Goldberg told CNN that she refused to refer to Trump by name in public, especially in conjunction with the word president. She acknowledged at the time that “he’s there” in the Oval Office, but said she “can’t” call him President Trump. “I know people don’t like that I don’t do it,” she explained. “I can live with that.”
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This week, however, Goldberg changed her mind—not only about saying Trump’s name, but also about appearing on The View in general. The host usually has Fridays off from the ABC daytime talk show, but chose to make an exception because she wanted to offer her perspective on “a very unique moment in history.”
“I want the judge to give him six months,” Goldberg said as the hosts discussed the possibility of Trump going to jail. She added that young Trump fans “love him because he has no consequences,” but a prison sentence might change that perception. “I feel like if we are going to treat this man, who used to be president, like everybody else, you need to do a little bit of time.”
Not doing so opens the country up to dangerous consequences, she argued. “If we don’t have any consequences here, we are screwed,” she said. “We give [Trump’s supporters] permission to do what he said he would do, which is shoot people on 5th Avenue and have no consequences.”
Goldberg and her cohosts also took aim at Trump’s claims that his conviction was the work of the Biden administration.
“He was in that courtroom because of what he did, and those jurors were chosen by both sides,” Goldberg said. “This was not a Biden thing. If he had just paid the money, he would’ve been fine,” but instead, “he was cheap, so that’s what you get.”
At the episode’s end, Goldberg closed out the show with a reminder. “We only have about 34 seconds left—so to recap: guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,” she continued, repeating the word exactly 34 times.
