Whoopi Goldberg refuses to say Trump’s name, but she’s not an election-denier.
Despite urges for people to get out the vote, it appears that well over 10 million Americans sat out the 2024 election. Only part of that lower turnout is the result of voter suppression.
Whatever the cause, the world either went to sleep haunted by or awoke to grim news following Election Day. And the co-hosts of The View were no exceptions.
Everyone copes in their own way. In the case of Whoopi Goldberg, she’s declining to say the disgraced former — and future — president’s name.
Whoopi Goldberg is ‘still not going to say his name’ after the dark events of November 5
“So what happened last night?” Whoopi Goldberg asked conversationally during the November 6 episode of The View. As you can see and hear in the video below, the room was full of tension and despair.
She did acknowledge that, barring some miracle, Donald Trump will resume his occupation of the Oval Office in January of 2025.
“He’s the president,” Whoopi conceded. “I’m still not going to say his name. That’s not going to change.”
“I’m profoundly disturbed,” Sunny Hostin expressed. “If you look at The New York Times this morning, the headline was ‘America Makes a Perilous Choice.’”
She recalled: “I think in 2016 we didn’t know what we would get from a Trump administration. We know now. We know now he will have almost unfettered power.”
Sunny Hostin drew an important distinction: “I worry not about myself actually. I don’t worry about my station in life.”
Whoopi was not the only panelist processing Trump’s alarming return to power
On the November 6 episode of The View, Sunny Hostin continued: “I worry about the working class. I worry about my mother, a retired teacher.”
She continued to list: “I worry about our elderly and their social security and medicare. I worry about my children’s future. Especially my daughter, who has less rights than I had.”
Sunny added: “As a woman of color, I was so hopeful that a mixed race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country.”
Speaking on the election, Sunny Hostin observed that, for Trump voters: “It had nothing to do with policy. This was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.”
She’s not entirely wrong. But she’s also not entirely right. There is an alarmingly large segment of the voting population who vote out of spite. They don’t care how much it harms them so long as someone else suffers more. However, there are also “low information voters” who don’t grasp the economic and political damage from Trump’s first term.
But, to be clear, the existence of “low information voters” is a policy failure. It is a failure of education, which has been systematically gutted over generations. And it is a failure of governments, who rely too heavily upon corporate media to relay information to incurious voters.
Joy Behar surprised some viewers
Despite the dire consequences of the 2024 presidential election (and the Senate, lest we forget), Joy Behar noted that, this time, “the system worked” as intended.
“We live in a democracy. People spoke. This is what people wanted. I vehemently disagree with the decision that Americans made, but I feel very, very hopeful that we have a democratic system in this country,” she expressed.
“We should value it. We should love it. We should protest if the situation arises that we need to protest, which I’m sure it will,” Joy Behar allowed. “I’ve been there this before with Nixon. We have a country and we can keep it.”
