The mood was boisterous Wednesday on the set of ABC’s hit talk show “The View” as the hosts celebrated a number of political losses handed to former President Trump in the midterm elections.
“I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, the single biggest loser of the night was one Donald J. Trump,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump’s former communications director and now the lone conservative on the panel. “He dragged down the Republican candidates in a huge way. He insisted on putting up candidates based on their fealty to him, not their qualifications.”
Griffin said some Republicans for whom “Jan. 6 was not enough of a reason to run the hell away from this guy” might be spurred by the midterms results to say that “we need to think long and hard about who we are as a party and why this man is our leader.”
“I know he was the biggest loser last night, I know he hates hearing that,” co-host Sunny Hostin said of Trump, an avid consumer of cable news who is known to provide feedback to people close to him about how he believes they appear on television.
Griffin repeated a joke she said she read online that “the only red wave was the ketchup running down the walls at Mar-a-Lago,” a reference to reports that Trump grew so furious following the 2020 election that he threw his lunch against a wall in the White House.
During a subsequent conversation with Jonathan Karl, ABC’s chief Washington correspondent, about Trump’s influence over the GOP, host Joy Behar said that “it was like a nightmare we were having [under Trump] and we all woke up.”
Host Sara Haines said she was “relieved” to see fewer than expected candidates who had embraced Trump’s unfounded theories about voter fraud notch wins during Tuesday’s election.
A number of Trump-backed candidates in key congressional races were handed losses in the midterms, with some results still trickling in and control of both houses of Congress undecided as of Wednesday morning.
“The View” is known for its often pointed criticism of Trump and Republicans. Last week, Hostin drew criticism from Griffin with comments she made about suburban women, saying the voting bloc voting for Republicans would be like “roaches voting for Raid.”