The View returned on Monday with a sharp message for Donald Trump right off the jump.
Opening the show for its 29th season, moderator Whoopi Goldberg coyly addressed MAGA’s premature celebration of the show’s presumed cancellation ahead of its annual summer hiatus. “
Thank you from all of us at this table,” Goldberg said after the hosts entered the studio to rousing applause at their return. “We are starting our new season, because we are very much here—and live,” she declared.
She and the other hosts aren’t “dead,” she added, after Joy Behar, 82, quipped that she was mentally “on vacay still.”
It was just before that vacation that Behar revealed the show was going off the air for its summer break. As it was around the same time the White House threatened The View could be next to be “pulled off air” over Behar’s claim that Trump was “jealous” of Barack Obama, many online MAGA commenters celebrated the show’s demise—assuming the hiatus was a soft launch of its cancelation. It appears to be business as usual, however, as Goldberg declared at the top of the show.
Sara Haines, Ana Navarro, Sunny Hostin, and Alyssa Farah Griffin also returned for the season’s premiere episode Monday, where the hosts kicked off their “Hot Topics” segments by sounding the alarm on RFK Jr. after his Senate hearing last week.
“The guy eats roadkill out of his freezer,” Behar said as the hosts tore into the Health Secretary’s moves limiting U.S. vaccinations, “I have to listen to that?”
Navarro added that Americans should take their medical information from their “trusted physician” rather than rely on the CDC after Kennedy Jr.’s takeover of the agency. “You certainly don’t take it from a guy who had a worm eating his brain.”
Kennedy was asked to answer for his latest moves restricting access to COVID vaccines, firing officials on vaccine advisory panels, claiming more people died from the mRNA vaccine than died from COVID, and more when he addressed the senate on Thursday.
“My husband’s parents died of COVID,” Hostin shared on the show after a clip of some of RFK Jr.’s senate responses, which reignited calls for him to resign—including from members of his family. It was “such a horrible loss for our family,” she went on. “The notion that people can’t access vaccines, I know will lead to death. I know it. And this misinformation that he is providing is such a disservice to children, seniors, everyone.”
Added former Trump White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump’s “single greatest accomplishment was Operation Warp Speed and helping get the COVID vaccine—and why he’s still runs away from that will never make sense to me.”
Pressed on “why” Trump would shirk one of his own accomplishments to support RFK Jr.’s crusade, Griffin offered a theory: “I think he loves that RFK is a Kennedy. He likes to say ‘I’ve got a Kennedy in my cabinet.’”
Added Haines incredulously, “And that‘s the Kennedy he wants?”
Monday’s conversation reveals that the show still has no qualms about making politics a centerpiece of the show, despite the Daily Beast report the hosts were told to tone down their anti-Trump segments. Navarro, who allegedly gave the most fierce pushback to the note from ABC’s top brass, kept the pressure on Trump and the first lady on social media even throughout her vacation from the show.
Former View host Rosie O’Donnell has also raised questions about the show’s future, with a TikTok video in which she claimed she’d heard rumblings that ABC would be examining the show for “bias.” In other words, she wrote, that’s “code for ‘We’re gonna cancel it, we’re just trying to soften you up first.’”
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