The cohosts of The View, along with guest host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, weighed in on the biggest news of the weekend after Donald Trump‘s administration made several strikes against key officials in Iran without Congressional authorization to begin a war.
While Hasselbeck was willing to trust Trump’s instincts in the move, the others weren’t so sure.
Whoopi Goldberg started the conversation by reviewing footage of Trump’s announcement and other politicians’ mixed reactions, saying, “So I want to note that this morning, a fourth soldier was declared dead. So are Americans going to support another military operation in the Middle East right now? I mean, we’ve had kind of a checkered past in going into the Middle East and not taking care of business. So I open it up.”
“I don’t think they’re going to support it if the president of the United States does not make a case and clearly explain why we went in there and what the end game is,” Ana Navarro said first. “Look, I’m not an Iran expert, and I’m not going to pretend that, because I spent two days watching former generals on CNN explaining this, I understand the Middle East, but I am a regular American, and I can tell you my reaction, and it was mixed feelings. Because when I heard that the Ayatollah was dead, I shared the opinion of so many Iranians around the world and including in the United States, I thought of Mahsa Amini, the journalist who was stopped by the morality police and cruelly, brutally killed. I thought of Vida Rabbani. I thought of my friend… whose uncle was executed by the Ayatollah in ’79, and that is one part. But I also have such anxiety.
“I am furious that we are going into war yet again without congressional approval. I am furious that the American people have not been brought into this. I am furious that we are doing this alone. Yes, Israel is part of it, but I look at Donald Trump, and I look at Netanyahu, and I see two leaders who I think politically, they benefit from war. Netanyahu is facing criminal charges for corruption back home. Donald Trump is facing very low numbers and the Epstein files that will not are not and we will not let go away.”
After pausing for audience applause, she continued, “And so a lot of Americans are, we were happy that the Ayatollah is dead. He’s a brutal, brutal regime. And let me just say one more thing Trump has, I think, changed since Venezuela. I think Venezuela, I think he thought Venezuela was incredibly successful, and he’s been making comparisons with what happened in Venezuela with what’s happening in Iran. I don’t know Iran. I know Venezuela. Maduro was a pithy little third-world dictator. Venezuela is not Iran. Iran has terrorist cells all over the world that they can activate. Venezuela was one and done. They went into the extricated Maduro, and that was the end of that. This certainly is not that he’s already told us it could be four or five more weeks of strikes. We are seeing retaliation by the Iranians that the Venezuelans, they didn’t have the ability to do. So I think that he’s in love with this idea of being the conquerer and the emperor after Venezuela. He’s got this Napoleonic complex. He thinks he’s Alexander the Great. But Venezuela is not Iran.”
Hasselbeck then weighed in and supported Trump’s move by saying, “I shall respect where you come from Ana on this, and your ability to broadly think about it and have heart in it. I also think it’s very easy to have political concussion at this point where — and I actually had a concussion a year ago, one of the side effects of losing depth perception — where you can’t see the depth of what is going on, because you’re just being constantly barraged by information or political opinion and now war. Understandably, the Americans are fatigued with the idea of war. We get that. We sit here. We know the repercussions of it, including a death. And I do want to say our hearts are with the families of those fallen soldiers. Your sacrifice will not be squandered. This war will be won.
“I do think it’s threefold. One, we have 47 million Iranian women who now have a hope of freedom. That’s a good thing. OK, we have a disgusting, disgusting terrorist regime ended, and the people finally have hope to create their own nation again, so that’s the hope. When we zoom out and do political realm, OK, which is not my specialty either, but we have a ton of friends in the military who specialize in this, we see that this is actually avoiding a boots on the ground war with China when we are able to choke their oil supply, and the president and our military are exemplary in doing so right now. They’ve cut the oil supply from Venezuela, and they’ve now reduced it and choked the oil supply to China in Iran, and now what that does is presumably prevent China from having an absolute stronghold on the globe. So this is a strategic move geopolitically that we may not fully understand, but I absolutely trust that this is best for our nation. We should be America first.”
Navarro then challenged Hasselbeck by saying, “What makes you think that the regime has ended?”
“Well, the absolute Ayatollah is dead,” Hasselbeck answered.
When crosstalk then began to erupt with Sunny Hostin weighing in, Goldberg said, “We’re not doing this crosstalk, finish your sentence.”
“I was just going to say, the bottom line is that this is an illegal war. This is an unconstitutional war. Only Congress can wage war. That’s the first thing. I think we have to call a thing a thing. So this is an illegal war,” Hostin said. “This is a presidential war. I will also say, I think, what Ana was about to say, ‘Did the regime really change?’ No. At this point, Donald Trump has come out and said, ‘I have some choices for who would lead, but they are dead now, too.’ And so now you have people that are in Iran picking their own people, so you don’t have a regime change, just like you don’t have a regime change in Venezuela. Also, what I’ll say is it’s very, very easy to start a war without a plan. It’s very difficult to end a war. We’ve seen in Russia, invading Ukraine, thinking that it was going to be over. It’s five years later, 610,000 Russians are either maimed or killed, no 1.2 million Russians maimed or killed, we’ve got 600,000 Ukrainians maimed or killed. That war is not over. I thought this was going to be the president of peace. I thought this president wanted to win a Nobel Peace Prize for peace. That is not what I’m seeing. I am not seeing America first. I think people that voted for Trump, I was not one of them. I think you were, those people wanted America first.”
“I proudly voted for Trump. The alternative was absolutely be under the wrong power,” Hasselbeck snapped back before the show went to commercial break.
When the show resumed, Sara Haines took her turn to weigh in, saying, “So much depends on what happens next. I mean, right now, I think there’s probably not a lot of popular support here in this country, purely because it’s a bit shocking. Obviously, no one was brought in on this decision. I do think that having the supreme leader killed and not in Iran is a good thing. This is the largest state-sponsored terrorist nation that has forever fueled China, Russia, as you pointed out, Elisabeth, and I think the protests that have been going on for months, the thousands of Iranians who have lost their lives, this is the largest protest since 1979, which is a big deal. Now I don’t know if the handing over their country is as clean as it sounds. Oftentimes, when you wipe out regimes, which we don’t know for sure, sunny, although 40 of the top leaders have been reported killed, so they’ve definitely decapitated the country right now. What happens next will really depend on how coordinated the people can be, because, remember, they’ve been suppressed for years. The Iranian people are amazing, and they deserve to live outside of this leader and this regime, but they also have had media blackouts. Any dissidents, they could be killed. They’ll just be killed. How well they speak to each other when they have facial recognition they’ve been using to identify protesters and then further eliminate them. So I just don’t think we know yet how long this [lasts] or what it looks like, but there are some benefits to this country if indeed it could go smoothly. It just remains a cautious optimism.”
Goldberg then weighed in saying, “Well, I just think we all have to remember that, because we don’t know what’s coming next. We don’t know how safe women are going to be. We don’t know. We don’t know. The key here is we don’t know, because it would be great if it happened and it happened the way we wanted to happen, and people found that freedom. But I’m not optimistic, because when you throw in religion, and you throw in male dominance, and … all kinds of stuff, you have to surf a lot of this. And if you don’t know what’s going on, all we can do is talk about what we see. But I am cautiously watching to see who is going to end up becoming the leader, and it is not somebody I think we need to appoint. This is up to the Iranian people to make that decision. We can’t just drop somebody in.”
Hasselbeck responded to Goldberg’s point by saying, “Even the president himself has said and the secretary war, Pete Hegseth, has said that this is now the time for the Iranian people to stand and do what they need to do.” She then showed a before-and-after photo of women in school as opposed to being “thrown off buildings,” and said, “I think there’s such hope, and it takes strength to find peace, and America should be first at that always.”
“I hope you’re right,” Navarro said. “I hope, for the sake of the Iranian people and for the sake of the world, for America’s sake, I hope you’re right. But I remember 1989 when the Ayatollah Khamenei died, and we thought, ‘This is over, and this is going to be great,’ and a worse guy came up. I remember seeing George W. Bush on a U.S. aircraft carrier with a big banner behind him that said, ‘Mission accomplished,’ and the mission had not been accomplished. I remember going into war with information that wasn’t true, and so there’s a lot that Donald Trump has to say and do, and I think it starts with Congress. I just think that they are our elected representatives, and he needs to give them the respect of giving them the information and making them part of it.”
“At this point, this is an unconstitutional war. It’s an illegal war. He didn’t go to Congress. He didn’t go to the U.N. He didn’t go before the American people, and that’s why, at this point, only 27% of Americans approve of these actions. And I don’t believe, I don’t have any confidence that Donald Trump has any sort of plan. Maybe he has concepts of a plan, but he does not have any sort of plan,” Hostin said defiantly.
Haines argued back, though, saying, “The other presidents that have gone in without congressional approval of Biden, Obama, Clinton, George H.W., Reagan. So I would be more upset that Congress has ceded this power than mad that the president didn’t check with Congress.”
“Well, I’m mad about all of it, to be honest,” Goldberg said to conclude the conversation.
The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC
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