Just days after the Daily Beast reported that the hosts of The View were told to tone down their political rhetoric, one host advised viewers to “pick your battles” when it comes to Donald Trump.
Sara Haines made the comment during a heated discussion about Trump’s pardons for reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, allowing the wealthy reality stars to walk away from their 12 and seven year prison sentences respectively following their guilty convictions for tax evasion and conspiring to defraud banks by submitting false documents to obtain loans.
After Ana Navarro insisted that “we have to not normalize this and allow it to continue to happen” because “it’s not normal or honest or ethical” that “there’s a ‘For Sale’ sign on the lawn of the White House,” Haines disagreed.
“Everyone reacts to everything, saying ‘Don’t normalize it,’” whenever Trump does something “outrageous,” she said. “There’s a strategy to picking your battles.” Offering viewers a “proverb,” to illustrate her point, Haines told the audience, “The man who chases two rabbits catches neither,” and “When you yell at everything, nobody hears anything.” She added, “It’s not to say any of this is not bad.”
Her comments come after internal tension between the hosts and ABC’s top brass were made public by the Daily Beast. ABC News President Almin Karamehmedovic told the six co-hosts to skew their conversations toward more celebrity news than politics. Navarro became the face of the pushback, only to find out that Disney CEO Bob Iger agreed with Karamehmedovic’s feedback.
A follow-up report from Fox News Digital quoted a View insider as saying that “most hosts agree” with higher-ups that the daytime show should have “less Trump-bashing,” suggesting that there’s a divide on how to cover Trump even among the hosts themselves. Haines played into that report with her on-air comments Wednesday, suggesting that people should be less outraged by Trump’s pardoning his supporters who commit crimes, as it’s “not surprising.”
Her comments didn’t go over well with some viewers who expressed their annoyance with her remarks on X. “So Sara is normalizing Trump pardoning criminals because Trump has too many other things for us to be mad about?!” wrote one. Another added, “The s--t can still be called out Sara.” And another annoyed user posted, “‘Not jumping every time #Trump does something?!’ Then maybe he shouldn’t keep doing/getting away with so many egregious acts.”
Haines was resolute, however. “There’s a strategy to not jumping every time he does something,” she added, just after her “chasing rabbits” metaphor. “I’m more upset about the Qatari jet, the January 6th pardons—which were violent criminals—the deportations without due process, the attacks on federal institutions with no cause. Those to me are fundamentally way more problematic.”
Joy Behar pointed out, “That’s a lot of rabbits you listed.”
