During yesterday’s episode of The View, co-host Joy Behar disagreed with fellow panelist Sunny Hostin’s objection to CNN’s town hall event featuring Donald Trump.
She’s changed her mind.
“I was wrong,” Behar said to kick off The View‘s Hot Topics discussion of the Kaitlan Collins-moderated event, explaining that her first impulse was to champion CNN’s decision as an example of First Amendment free speech. “What I didn’t know was that the audience would be filled with his cult.”
“Was CNN passing out Kool-Aid before the event started?,” she asked, using the Jonestown-inspired phrase indicating what’s been defined as the mindless adoption of dogma.
Watch the segment below.
Behar was particularly critical of CNN’s decision to fill its Town Hall audience with Republicans and undecided voters. “If I do a comedy show and everybody loves me,” she said, “I’m going to be funnier, that’s how it works. But if you have people who don’t particularly think that you’re funny, you have to work harder.
“What I saw last night was a bad comedian with a bunch of people in his cult who love him.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin, the View‘s Republican voice, a CNN contributor and former Trump communications staffer who has since broken from her old boss, said she supported CNN’s decision to stage the Town Hall because of Trump’s status as a GOP frontrunner.
Besides, Griffin said, America got the opportunity to see Trump as “a ranting, raving lunatic.” She also praised Collins’ performance as “a masterful job.”
Hostin disagreed, saying Collins was not prepared, and that CNN should have had a chyron saying “this is a lie, this is a lie, this is a lie” to fact-check Trump in real time. Hostin then debunked Trump’s claims on his China tariffs, Covid and the border wall, noting that Collins “didn’t mention that Mexico didn’t pay for the Wall, we paid for the Wall.”
Co-host Sara Haines disagreed that the Town Hall needed a real-time truth machine: “I didn’t need a fact-checker to tell me he was incoherent.”
As for View moderator Whoopi Goldberg, she mostly held back from the discussion, signaling her opinion only in her introduction: “Yesterday CNN had a Town Hall with You-Know-Who, and for me, CNN showed me that they were a ball-free zone.”