Opening the door to potentially constructive conversations or merely “kissing the ring” of the man who called new media the “enemy from within?”
This morning’s announcement by Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that they met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday in an attempt to restart communications with the president-elect after seven years of bitter feuding and silence drew some heated and, not surprisingly, differing opinions on today’s The View.
While cohosts Sara Haines and Republican Alyssa Farah Griffin praised the Morning Joe détente as a welcome first step, Sunny Hostin and Ana Navarro – two of the fiercer Trump critics on the ABC daytime talker – had some harsher words.
“The bottom line,” said Hostin, “is that America needs a free press that is willing to speak truth to power right now more than ever. I think we have to be very clear on it when we think about the president-elect and cover the president elect and I don’t think you need to sit down for 90 minutes at Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring to be able to speak truth and be able to cover a story.”
Hostin conceded that Scarborough and Brzezinski are “not journalists in the true sense” but rather “opinion journalists,” but added, “You have to remember that Trump is the guy who ushered in the era of fake news, he’s the guy who ushered in alternative facts, he is the guy who attacked three black female journalists, he’s the guy who revoked Jim Acosta’s press credentials for asking a question…I don’t think he can be trusted in the way that other presidents could be trusted. This is an aberration.”
Navarro, a Never-Trump Republican and one of his staunchest critics, was even more blistering than Hostin about the president-elect and the press.
“In 2016 people voted for the unknown and voted thinking that maybe the gravitas of the office was going to change him,” Navarro said. “In 2024 people voted knowing who he was and nothing that he is doing, as concerning as I find it and as disturbing as I find it, should be shocking because he told us he was going to do these things, he was surrounded by the people he’s appointing. And he is keeping to his word and people voted for him knowing that.
“It’s a sobering truth,” she continued, “and hard to reconcile with what we [on The View] have been doing for the last eight years.. I will never sit down with him and I don’t think I’m gonna have to make that decision because I don’t think I’ll ever get invited.
“The truth of the matter is, as we know around this table, that it is hard to criticize and denounce the abuses of power by Donald trump when he is president. We have been there before – it means threats, it means death threats, it means retribution against your family, it means crazy things showing up at your house, it means lawsuits, it means all sorts of things. We’ve done it before and if we have to do it again we will do so again..
“I think,” she continued, “there are probably a lot of people looking at what Joe and Mika did and find it opportunistic. There are people who change their stripes or maybe their spots depending on who’s in power – I don’t know if that’s what happening with them. Everybody has to live with their decisions, everybody have to look in the mirror. I’m good.”
Moderator Whoopi Goldberg, also a fervid critic of, as she calls him, “You Know Who,” said she’s taking a wait and see approach. “I’m going to wait to see what I’m dealing with …I’m going to have some popcorn and if I have something to say I will say it. To predict what we’re going to do is impossible to say. I want to see what we’re up against, I want to see what will happen.”
After the Hot Topic discussion about Morning Joe, the panel pivoted to recent comments made by Bill Maher about the Left’s inability to view the election results through any lens but race and gender, rather than the economy.
While Griffin supported the notion that voters were motivated by economic factors, Hostin and Navarro pointedly had issues with the comment. “Racism and misogyny are alive and well, I think we don’t want to think that about our neighbors,” Hostin said, while Navarro, saying that she personally like Maher and has been a guest on his show, noted that “maybe when you live life as a woman of color you feel [racism and sexism] a little bit more than when you are white man in America.”
“If you are not seeing racism and sexism in America,” Navarro said, “then you need to clean your lenses.”
