"The View" host Whoopi Goldberg on Tuesday made a case for why she feels sorry for former President Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio.
“This poor guy. I feel so bad for him,” she said, referring to a recent report from the Washington Post that Vance privately admitted that Vice President Kamala Harris' presumptive Democratic nomination is a “political sucker punch” to the Trump campaign.
Speaking to Republican donors ahead of a rally in Minnesota over the weekend, Vance reportedly shared that Harris could thwart team MAGA's best-laid plans, which largely hinged upon President Joe Biden's remaining in the race.
“All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch,” Vance told GOP donors, according to the report. “The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did."
"Love ’em or hate ’em, everybody has an opinion about Donald Trump and Joe Biden after the past eight years. But Kamala Harris, people don’t really know," the conservative senator said.
“Remember how Mr. T used to pity the fool? Well, I pity this man,” Goldberg added. “I pity him, because he’s had a very bumpy roll-out so far, and here he is, once again saying one thing in public and another thing in private. So, how much of a liability is this guy becoming?”
“I think Trump is shaking," co-host Joe Behar concurred. "He’s like, ‘I picked the wrong guy, what do I do?!’ He’s scared now.”
Host Sara Haines then shared a clip of Vance's friend from Yale Law School, Sofia Nelson, speaking to CNN and noting that Trump's VP pick is a "chameleon" who has altered his beliefs on "literally every imaginable issue."
Nelson, a transgender public defender, aired a trove of telling email exchanges she had with Vance from mid-2014 through early 2017. Vance in the correspondence refers to Trump's “racism” and defines him to be a “morally reprehensible human being,” per the New York Times.
“He is bereft of morality, he’s bereft of empathy. He’s got a spine, it’s just not a good one,” Goldberg argued.
“Look, you know what you got to do…," she concluded, speaking to "The View"'s audience. "You can choose to vote. Lots of people don’t get to vote. You have the right to vote. It is your birthright, don’t toss it away.”
Vance has separately drawn public ire for a past comment he made in which he generalized that women without children are "childless cat ladies" while also speaking in direct reference to Harris. During a 2021 appearance on former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson's show, Vance claimed that these women “want to make the rest of the country miserable too."
The GOP senator has since tried to walk back the remark. During a sit down with Fox News' Trey Gowdry on Sunday, Vance claimed that rather than criticize people who choose not to have children, he had instead been trying to call out the left's perceived "anti-child and anti-family" agenda.
“The left has increasingly become explicitly anti-child and anti-family, and they encouraged young families not to have children at all over concerns of climate change, and they suggested people having children are somehow being selfish, when being a parent is the most selfless thing that you can do,” Vance said. “This is not a criticism and never was a criticism of everybody without children — that is a lie of the left. It’s a criticism of the increasingly anti-parent and anti-child attitude of the left."
