When Whoopi Goldberg is fact-checking her fellow hosts on “The View” — and those co-hosts aren’t the token conservatives — you know someone’s made a boo-boo.
Such was the case on Tuesday, as a spirited panel on the ABC talk show spoke out about former President Donald Trump’s potential indictment in relation to payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels and whether they should have been disclosed as campaign expenditures. Aside from the obvious downside (at least for those on “The View”) that this was a plus for the potential candidacy of Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, you could tell they were delighted that the former president was potentially getting indicted over his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels.
Not that they knew anything about the details, mind you. In fact, Joy Behar was so wrong that Whoopi had to swoop in with a fact-check.
So, as you’ve no doubt heard, a potential indictment from the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is about to be handed down against the former president regarding l’affaire Stormy Daniels. The arrest would potentially revolve around campaign finance violations and falsifying business records — and while signs initially pointed to the indictment happening Tuesday, it didn’t — and, as CNN noted, “it is not clear yet that the former president will be charged or when those charges could be unveiled.”
In remarks on Monday, DeSantis pushed back on Bragg — a soft-on-crime progressive district attorney in the George Soros mold — while also seeming to throw a jab at Trump at the same time.
“What I can speak to is that you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction, and he chooses to go back many, many years ago, to try to use something about porn star hush-money payments,” DeSantis said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “That’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office.”
As for the logistics of the matter: “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” DeSantis said.
Now, as you might imagine, co-hosts on “The View” have been having the time of their lives over the Sword-of-Damocles indictment threat. According to The Wrap, Joy Behar has called “the irony … delicious,” further cementing my belief she doesn’t know what irony is and that people who use “delicious” as a word in any context that doesn’t involve food should be drummed out of polite society. Another co-host, Sara Haines, said it was “like the mafia going down on tax evasion.” A few days later, she implied, absent any evidence, that Melania Trump is being paid to stay in the marriage.
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On Tuesday, the hosts, including the token Republicans, used the speech to slam DeSantis, with former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin saying, “When Trump is cornered, he grows emboldened — and then for whatever reason, everyone circles around him and defends him.”
If that’s the kind of defense Trump is counting on to keep him from getting politically railroaded, my assumption is he could use less defenses. But I digress, because this all presupposes an affair between Daniels and Trump — something which has been thoroughly established, right?
Not quite — and, at the end of the segment, Joy Behar’s ignorance on the matter managed to (I’m so sorry, but the pun is unavoidable) trump any of her prior statements.
For those of you who’ve never watched “The View,” one of their common tropes is to read a “legal note” — a comment from the other side in the case under discussion — giving a few seconds of air time to something that isn’t just “The View” party line.
The note is oft read by Sunny Hostin, a lawyer by training. This time, she noted that “Trump has denied any criminal wrongdoing –”
“What?” one of the hosts exclaimed off-camera, as if the principle of innocence until being proven guilty was a new thing for her.
Hostin continued: “And said he never had an affair … with Stormy Daniels.”
Behar was indignant: “We have photographs!” implying they were proof of the affair.
“Specifically with Stormy,” Griffin added.
“Don’t we have pictures of this?” Behar said.
“No, we don’t have pictures,” Whoopi responded.
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Behar then went to point out there was a picture of Trump together with Daniels, which is to say there’s a picture of Trump together with every celebrity known to the Western world (and presumably some who aren’t).
For instance:
The majority of Trump haters are just parroting media tropes. His reputation in the NE stands on it’s own.
Now explain how Hollywood and the NY elite thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread?
Seems Oprah thought they would make a great political team. ?
Ahem…. pic.twitter.com/5q09Am7lvx
— Kel (antiwar voluntaryist) #DefundCongress (@Bettswithfive) March 16, 2023
Apparently, this constitutes evidence the entire 2016 campaign was a hush-money exercise to cover up Trump’s affair with Hillary Clinton, to use Behar’s logic. Want to go with that one, Joy? Or want to, in game-show parlance, phone a friend?
She didn’t need to, because Whoopi was happy to dial in on her own. “We have a picture of him, and we have a picture of her, and not of them,” she said, emphasizing the last part in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way.
Now, this all may not matter when it comes to the legal case against Trump, if it’s ever made by Bragg’s office; the money is in question, not the sex, although caving to blackmail and paying hush money play far differently in front of juries.
Still, the fact is “The View” had an eight-minute discussion about the first indictment of a former president and didn’t seem to know the basic facts regarding the case. They seem to be singularly unconcerned about this fact, as well. Behar, in particular, shrugged it off by saying that she’d had a picture of her with Trump and that didn’t mean they’d had an affair, either.
Joy, Joy, Joy. There isn’t enough digital ink in the world for me to spill in order to explain all of the problems with that line of self-exculpation.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
