“The View” co-hosts locked horns Friday over whether the Democratic Party needs to reckon with how it protected then-President Joe Biden from scrutiny amid rumors of his decline or move on to focus on President Donald Trump.
Adding fuel to the fire is the upcoming book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” co-written by CNN host Jake Tapper, who admitted he did not cover Biden’s worsening condition enough.
“The View” shared clips of Tapper talking about his coverage, followed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., stating their intent to look forward rather than back, which sparked a heated debate among the hosts.
Co-host Sara Haines responded that many people have lost faith in the Democratic Party precisely because it spent too much time denying and trying to distract people from what they could see with their own eyes.
“They told the voters what to care about, and they did not listen when the voters said they cared,” she added. “So these stories coming out aren’t about beating a dead horse, it’s saying if they could have a fair conversation that ‘We heard you, we saw it as they saw it,’ they’d be gaining some of the voters back.”
Co-host Sunny Hostin slammed Haines’ analysis. “I think that I want to move on from why the Democratic Party lost and I want to hear from the Democratic Party about how we are going to take our country back,” Hostin said, offering a laundry list of grievances with the Trump administration.
Co-host Ana Navarro condemned campaign books like Tapper’s for featuring anonymous insiders, arguing it makes each of them look like a “complicit coward.”
“Or was there a culture within the White House that people felt that they couldn’t speak truth to power?” Griffin responded, citing quotes in the book where people claimed they would be “boxed out of meetings” if they raised concerns.
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One key example from the book Griffin mentioned was when Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at a political fundraiser in June.
Behar disregarded the incident and sparked laughter from the audience by quipping, “[Clooney] looks different lately.”
Griffin argued it was a stark sign Biden would not have been able to rise to the occasion during a time of crisis. “Does that give you confidence that, in the middle of the night, if China is about to attack us, there’s a war breaking out in Iran, that he is the sharpest person to be able to handle that?”
Behar dismissed the argument again, contrasting Biden’s administration with the current Trump administration.
“Do we just keep lowering the bar because Trump is bad?” Griffin asked. “‘Nothing else is bad because Trump is bad?'”
After further back and forth, Behar declared, “This ship has sailed. It’s out in the ocean somewhere with Biden. It’s over. Get over it.”
“We have Trump because you guys screwed this up,” Griffin exclaimed. “All due respect.”
Haines, who has slammed Democrats for hiding Biden’s decline before, argued they are acting like the Republican Party.
“Dems are actually taking a page from Republicans, because Republicans didn’t want us to look at January 6,” she said. “They said, ‘Let’s look forward. Don’t look at what happened on that day. Look over there.’ So in a way it’s working. Both parties did this.”
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