Weeks after condemning Morning Joe anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski for meeting with President elect Donald Trump after he won his second election in November, The View returned to the topic this morning.
Scarborough and Brzezinski insisted on their show earlier today that their meeting with Trump helped them better serve their viewers and that it was “important” that they spoke with him.
However, not everyone at The View agreed. Joy Behar, in particular, took issue with the co-anchors for “normalizing” Trump by taking a meeting with him.
While she agreed with Alyssa Farah Griffin‘s point that “dialogue is so important in fraught times,” Behar said she thinks people are having a “problem” with the Morning Joe Trump meeting because “there’s a certain feeling that they’re normalizing him, and he’s not normal.”
She continued, “He’s a very unusual case … and he became a president based on a lot of lies.”
Behar then told the table, “I have a personal thing about this, because when George W. Bush was in the White House, I knew that if I had a beer with the guy, I would like him. I knew it! And so I didn’t want to have a beer with him, because I had things to say about George W. Bush that were critical of him.”
She continued, “If I had sat down with the guy, I would feel maybe I can’t anymore, you see? That’s my problem with Morning Joe.”
Today’s chat came after The View‘s Nov. 18 episode, during which Sunny Hostin accused the Morning Joe hosts of “kissing” Trump’s ring by meeting him a Mar-a-Lago.
“The bottom line is that America needs a free press that is willing to speak truth to power right now more than ever. And I think that we have to be very clear-eyed when we think about the president-elect and cover the president-elect,” she said at the time. “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 to be able to cover a story.”
Hostin continued, “So maybe they’re not journalists in the true sense. Maybe they’re saying that they’re opinion journalists. But we have to remember that Trump is the guy who ushered in the era of fake news.”
The View airs weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.