The White House lashed out at Joy Behar after she said on ABC’s The View that Donald Trump‘s attacks on his predecessor, Barack Obama, were motivated by jealousy, while noting the current president’s role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
On Wednesday, Behar and the other View co-hosts talked about Obama’s response to Trump’s claim that his predecessor was guilty of treason. The Trump administration claims that Obama and his team conspired to alter intelligence assessments to boost the notion Russia was attempting to help Trump get elected in 2016.
Obama’s spokesperson called the allegations “bizarre” and a “weak attempt at distraction.”
On The View, Behar said, “First of all, who tried to overthrow the government on January 6th? Who was that again?”
Behar added, “The thing about him is he is so jealous of Obama, because Obama is everything that he is not. Trim. Smart. Handsome. Happily married. And can sing Al Green’s song ‘Let’s Stay Together’ better than Al Green.”
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said, “Joy Behar is an irrelevant loser suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s no surprise that The View’s ratings hit an all-time low last year. She should self-reflect on her own jealousy of President Trump’s historic popularity before her show is the next to be pulled off air.” EW first reported on the White House response.
Trump has celebrated the decision by CBS to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, hosted by another of his critics. On Tuesday, he predicted that ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel “is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone. These are people with absolutely NO TALENT, who were paid Millions of Dollars for, in all cases, destroying what used to be GREAT Television. It’s really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!”
At the same time, the White House highlighted Trump’s claims about 2016. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has claimed that Obama’s team was engaged in “a years-long coup intended to subvert President Trump’s entire presidency,” appeared at the White House press briefing today to talk about the release of new documents. That was a 2017 GOP House Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference, casting doubt on the intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin favored Trump to win the election.
But a 2020 bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Russia did interfere in the election, while detailing contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian influence actors.
Obama’s spokesperson said that “nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes.”
On The View, other hosts said that Trump’s focus on Obama, and the referral to the Justice Department to investigate, was an attempt to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein story.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, who was Trump’s director of strategic communications in his first term, said, “I saw the intelligence that we had. I actually was with Mike Pence when he confronted Vladimir Putin in Singapore and said, ‘We know what you tried to do in our elections, Do not do it again.’ It was the consensus of the people in the first term, including the director of national intelligence, that Russia did try to meddle in our elections.”