The cohosts of ABC’s “The View” invited Vice President Kamala Harris to join them on Tuesday in piling on former President Donald Trump, and Harris was only too happy to take them up on the offer.
Harris has faced criticism from both Republicans and Democrats for failing to do substantive interviews — and if the softball questions she got from the left-leaning cohosts of the midday talk show are any indication of what’s to come, those critics aren’t likely to be satisfied anytime soon.
Couched comfortably between the softballs, cohosts Ana Navarro and Joy Behar encouraged Harris to take a few potshots at her Republican opponent, and she obliged.
Navarro rescued Harris from the only serious question of the day — which she had fumbled by saying that she couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently from President Biden — and gave her a mulligan.
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“Well, let’s — Kamala, and I’m calling you Kamala ’cause for all of those who are mispronouncing it, I want you all to know how to say it,” Navarro began, prompting laughs and applause. “Let’s talk about something you would do different from Donald Trump. Right now there is a monster storm barreling towards my state of Florida, a place that’s still reeling from Hurricane Helene. Trump is lying, claiming that the Biden administration is intentionally withholding aid from the areas where Republicans live and that FEMA funds are being redirected to migrants. Ironically, that is something he did in 2019. What do you think the effect of these lies are and why is he doing this?”
“It’s profound and it is the height of irresponsibility, and frankly, callousness,” Harris replied.
WATCH:
Harris: “He puts himself before the needs of others. I fear that he really lacks empathy on a very basic level to care about the suffering of other people, and then understand the role of a leader is not to beat people down, it’s to lift people up.” pic.twitter.com/u2llC8J9Rp
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) October 8, 2024
“And the idea that somebody would be playing political games for the sake of himself, but this is so consistent about Donald Trump,” Harris continued. “He puts himself before the needs of others. I fear that he really lacks empathy on a very basic level to care about the suffering of other people, and then understand the role of a leader is not to beat people down, it’s to lift people up.”
Later on in the show, it was Behar who pushed Harris to jab at Trump again. Despite the fact that cohost Whoopi Goldberg refuses to say Trump’s name allowed — and once pretended to spit on the studio floor after accidentally letting it slip — Behar suggested that Trump was afraid to come on the show.
WATCH:
Joy Behar suggests Trump is refusing to come on The View, meanwhile they announced that they’ve banned him from the show.”
First, let me say that I like candidates who show up for interviews,” she tells Harris.
Behar uses dangerous rhetoric to suggest he’s a Nazi and “dictator.” pic.twitter.com/SjKGkbavio— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) October 8, 2024
“First, let me say that I like candidates who show up for interviews, just saying,” she said, and the audience laughed. “So – um — we all know the background of the guy — is a convicted felon, okay, a big-time loser, has been pretty open about his plans if elected to stack D.C. with loyalists, going after the media and comedians. How threatened do you have to be to go after comedians? He wants to do some mass deportations which really, really is a throwback to the thirties. A dictatorship by any other name, this is what he is planning.”
“People are saying this could be the closest election in a century,” Behar continued. “I personally cannot understand why anyone would vote for him, a lot of it I think is people are getting bad information from other channels, but do you have an explanation for this at all?”
“Well, let me just add to your list,” Harris, who had been nodding along in agreement with Behar throughout, began — and then started laughing along with the audience and cohosts.
“It’s only an hour show,” Behar interrupted.
“How much time do you have?” Harris laughed. “Including he has said he would terminate the Constitution of the United States.”
What Trump actually said, in a Truth Social post in December of 2022, was a response to internal Twitter emails proving that the platform had intentionally buried reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s now infamous laptop — information which, according to polling, could very well have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump said at the time, accusing Democrats of colluding with social media platforms. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
