On Monday’s (October 20) edition of The View, the cohosts were joined by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to talk about a wide range of issues, including the weekend’s massive “No Kings” protests around the country, Donald Trump‘s reaction to them, and, of course, the still-looming government shutdown.
Before Sanders took the stage, the cohosts each offered their thoughts on the rallies first.
Whoopi Goldberg, for one, wanted to combat some Republicans’ claims that the rally-goers were paid protestors. “A lot of Republicans claim that these are paid protesters and not real Americans exercising their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly. Seven million people. Nobody paid anybody. I mean, the only people getting paid are the people who are in government right now,” she said. “People are pissed. They don’t like what they’re seeing.”
Ana Navarro then revealed that she was one of the millions to march and had patriotic reasons for doing so. “I went to the one here in Manhattan, in New York. If I am going to get paid, I need to know where to send the invoice, because I went not to get paid, I want to pay my country back for everything she has given me for being the place where I found freedom and refuge, and I want to defend those American values.”
Sunny Hostin then offered her reaction to Trump nay-saying the protestors and sharing an AI-generated video of himself with a crown in a King Trump-themed jet dropping feces on the protestors. “I think that Trump’s reaction to the protest is evidence of the success of the protest because he’s very concerned about size, and especially crowd size. And he said it’d be very small, very, very small. I mean, 7 million people. It’s actually the largest protest in modern American history.” She then called him “unpresidential” and referred back to a time when Barack Obama wearing a tan suit to a press conference was a five-alarm fire for certain news analysts.
Alyssa Farah Griffin then applauded the protestors for being “civilly engaged” but cautioned that the numbers of the marches don’t matter if they can’t turn “this momentum into tangible organizing.” As she explained, “We talk about what Trump’s been doing. He’s playing a 10-year game. He’s at every level. He’s got his people elected as state school officials and school boards. They’ve got think tanks, they’ve got voter registration on college campuses. So a movement like this matters if it turns into something tangible and actually getting voters out, or it could fall flat, like the Women’s March. It was huge, and it felt powerful, and then it kind of just petered out.”
Goldberg ended the first discussion of the matter by reiterating her oft-stated point that people in America right now need to be more self-sufficient in making changes they want, saying, “It is really on us. It’s on the American people. It always has been and always will be. If you see stuff you don’t like, figure out a way to fix it in your town. You don’t like what the library is doing, then put one of those little libraries out where you can put books out so kids can come and get. You want them to be able to read… There are ways for us to combat it. We don’t have to spend a lot of money, but it does require that we spend time with each other and figure out how to fix that.”
After the break, Sanders then joined the table and offered some fiery takes on all things politics. First, in reacting to the protests, he was visibly choked up with admiration. “It was an extraordinary moment,” he said.
Then, when Goldberg joked, “Yeah, size does matter,” he noted, “To know, Whoopi, that this was taking place not only in large cities, but in small towns all over America — I think it was something like 26,000 different rallies — and more people came out to say no to Trumpism than in any single day in the history of America. And we should all be very proud.”
Navarro then asked him to respond to those Republicans who suggested the protesters were Hamas sympathizers and violent criminals, and he said, “I think they are fomenting hatred when you have the Speaker of the House say, ‘This is a hate America rally.’ Why did people come out? They came out to defend the Constitution of the United States, the basic freedoms to say to Donald Trump, ‘You know what? You cannot send the military into Portland, Oregon. You cannot take people off the street with masks and throw them and deport them to South Sudan. You can’t go after the media… to intimidate law firms, to intimidate universities, that is not what this country is about.'” He also called Trump a “megalomaniac and a pathological liar.”
ABC
Elsewhere in the discussion, Sanders was also prompted by Sara Haines to talk about the ongoing shutdown, as the Democrats refuse to back down over the issue of extending Affordable Care Act subsidies.
“I want to see the shutdown ended tomorrow. Got a lot of good, decent, hard-working federal employees not getting their paychecks, that’s not right. But I want to explain to everybody really what’s at stake because I don’t know that people are clear about it. As a result of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ which to my mind was one of the worst pieces of legislation passed in history, this is what is going to happen: 15 million low-income and working-class Americans are going to lose their health insurance. Studies indicate that when you take away health insurance with so many people, you know what happens? 50,000 people will die unnecessarily every single year, 50,000 of our fellow Americans,” he said. “In my state of Vermont, people are getting notices that their premiums, which are now outrageously high, are going to triple, in some cases, quadruple, on average nationally, double. Why did Trump and the Republicans do this? In order to pay for a $1 trillion tax break for the 1%, for Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos and all of these multi-billionaires…. I cannot go back to the people in Vermont or any place else in this country, and say, I’m going to vote to allow 50,000 of our fellow Americans to be kicked off their healthcare.”
The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC
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