The women of The View break down the president’s response, wondering if it’s an intentional distraction from the ongoing government shutdown, while discussing what needs to happen next if it’s all going to actually mean anything.
“It was huge and it felt powerful and then it kind of just petered out.” That’s what Alyssa Farah Griffin said on Monday’s new episode of The View. She wasn’t talking about this past weekend’s “No Kings” protests, but rather the massive Women’s March in 2017 to protest Trump’s first term.
Women marched to “advocate legislation and policies related to human rights, women’s rights, immigration and healthcare reform, racial equality, religious freedom, and LGBTQ rights,” as detailed by the Museum of the City of New York, only to watch many of those very rights being stripped away or rolled back in the intervening years.
“It’s always a good thing when people are politically engaged. I think left, right, or center, if you’re showing up, you’re peaceably assembling, that’s something I applaud,” Griffin said on Monday’s episode. “My question is will this momentum turn into tangible organizing.”
She then pulled out some stats that noted the Republican party had gained 2.5 million voters in the four years between presidential elections, while Democrats lost 2.1 million.
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Ana Navarro, who was among the estimated seven million “No Kings” protesters who took to the streets in cities and communities across the nation over the weekend said that “it feels really good to be in community, because I think there are so many people who are afraid, and it’s a lot easier to speak out when you’re not the only voice speaking out.”
But that’s only half of the equation, with Navarro going on to emphasize, “We need to channel this energy. All of these protests will mean nothing if we can’t organize and channel this energy not to the streets, not just to the streets, but also to voting booths.”
While it is important that a movement like this lead to actual tangible action, as Griffin argued, Sara Haines doesn’t want to downplay the importance of people “coming together as a community. Because if we’re in a divided time where everyone’s angry, things are happening where the president in office promised things and the way that he’s executing them is not how he sold them. So people are starting to feel hopeless, helpless, and struggling with their groceries, their money and their housing.”
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At the same time, she can’t help but wonder if all the noise that’s erupting around it, largely coming from Trump and his allies in DC, is “a distraction on the fact that the majority of Americans are blaming the Republican party and the administration for the shutdown that is still going on.”
“So focusing on the ‘anti-American protests,’ as he would say it, distracts away from what they’re not getting done,” she argued.
The estimated 7 million protesters nationwide is a significant boost over June’s similar protests, which failed to draw a million, landing as “the largest protest in modern American history,” as Sunny Hostin characterized it, with Whoopi Goldberg adding, “not tied to a war.” In fact, as far as single-day protests, it pales only to the very first Earth Day protest in 1970, which saw an estimated 20 million people hitting the streets.
Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 saw an estimated 15 to 26 million hitting the streets across several days and weeks, but these were largely unorganized protests with unsubstantiated figures. The largest single figure for that event was 500,000 marked on June 6, 2020.
” I think that Trump’s reaction to the protests are evidence of the success of the protests,” Sunny asserted. “He’s saying — you know, he’s very concerned about size, and especially crowd size, and he said small, very, very small. I mean, seven million people; it’s actually the largest protest in modern American history.”
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Goldberg had launched the segment with a video clip of Trump telling reporters aboard Air Force One of the protests, “I think it’s a joke … the demonstrations were very small, very ineffective, and the people were wacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country.”
He went on to argue in the clip, “I’m not a king, I’m not a king I work my ass off to make our country great, that’s all it is. I’m not a king at all.” Goldberg then paired this clip with the AI video trump released of him wearing a crown while flying a fighter jet and dropping feces on protesters.
Hostin remarked how “unpresidential” Trump has become in his more recent public appearances, and in this response to a peaceful protest. “It was just striking to me that he is using profanity when he is speaking to the press corps, and an AI video of feces on United States citizens,” she said before recalling the GOP outrage when Obama wore a tan suit. “Do you remember Tan-Suit-gate?” she asked. “I want to go back to those days.”
Goldberg interjected to talk about farmers “out of their minds with anger because he bailed out Argentina, who is now selling their soybeans to China, who our farmers used to sell to” and Trump “dropping bombs and saying, well, we think they’re drug dealers, we think that’s who it is” as examples of reasons Americans on both sides of the political aisle are speaking out.
“I think people, Republicans and Democrats, are not in favor of this. This is not how you do it,” she insisted, saying that, as always, it’s up to the American people to shape the country they want to see. “If you see stuff you don’t like, figure out a way to fix it,” she said. “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 it.”
