During Tuesday’s (May 20) episode of The View, the hosts passionately discussed whether Americans and the media should be giving more attention to concerns around President Joe Biden’s or President Donald Trump’s “cognitive decline.”
The conversation kicked off with the mention of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s fresh release, Original Sin, which discusses how some White House insiders reportedly were aware of President Biden’s “cognitive decline” during his 2024 re-election campaign.
Whoopi Goldberg questioned the panel regarding the relevance of this issue, especially in light of the challenges within Trump’s administration. “Why is this important to know now? Because it just seems to me we have plenty of other pressing matters to worry about,” she remarked.
Joy Behar took Goldberg’s cue to list the many things she believes Americans have to be “concerned about,” calling them “Trump’s atrocities.”
“Should I list them? Here’s Trump’s atrocities,” Behar said as she began rattling off over a dozen of motions Trump has passed since beginning his second term in January. “This is what we’re concerned about now: Cutting Medicaid, slashing funding for cancer research, slashing funding because of tariffs, dismantling USAID which helps children who are poor around the world, destroying due process, ending birthright citizenship…”
After listing many, many more of these “atrocities,” Behar also called out President Trump for claiming President Biden is suffering from “stage nine cancer.”
“Oh really? Where did he come up with that? When is Jake Tapper going to write about the cognitive decline of the person who is in charge right now?” she wondered.
Alyssa Farah Griffin took issue with the criticism against Tapper and other journalists who have reported on the left, asking, “With political figures who are coming out and attacking [Tapper and Thompson] how is that pro-democracy?”
“This is where I take some issue with folks on the left,” Griffin ranted. “[They say], ‘We stand with journalists, we stand with free press,’ when they’re going after their opponents like Donald Trump, but when they critically cover the democrats, it’s, ‘Oh no, they’re lying. It’s fairy dust, it’s not true.’”
At one point during the conversation, all of the ladies began interrupting each other as Sunny Hostin railed against former White House officials who spoke out against Trump only after he left office. She pointedly called out former Attorney General Bill Barr, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and others.
“We should be very, very concerned about the people who were in the Trump administration that did hold on to information about how Trump was conducting the presidency and saw they could make money off of their book,” she said. “All of them knew what Trump was, who he was, how he was doing it, and they all wrote a book!”
The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.
