The audience at “The View” is known to be vocal, both in their approval and their discontent — so much so that moderator Whoopi Goldberg was recently even startled by it — but on Thursday morning, the crowd went dead silent for Donald Trump’s latest stunt.
The stunt in question was, of course, Trump’s team mocking up and sharing a fake TIME cover depicting him as a king, after Trump himself literally posted “Long the live the king” about himself on social media, which immediately sparked backlash.
The move comes just a week and a half after Trump pretended that he didn’t know TIME was even still in business in response to their very real cover depicting Elon Musk at the resolute desk.
Showing the image to the crowd on Thursday’s episode of “The View,” you could nearly hear a pin drop with how silent the crowd went, which you can see in the video above.
Host Joy Behar had a joke at the ready though, agreeing that Trump is a king: “the lyin’ king.”
“If he’s king, I’m queen Beatrice of the Netherlands,” she added.
And, while the hosts mostly scoffed at the fake cover, the women agreed that it was likely just a long-term tactic, that also serves as a current distraction.
“I think Elon Musk is king, and he’s much more of a court jester,” Ana Navarro said. “What he did with this calling himself of a king, is he’s trolling the opposition, and he is distracting us, distracting the media, so that we don’t talk about the nuclear scientists who were accidentally fired, right? So that we don’t talk about the bird flu experts that were accidentally fired.”
“So that we don’t talk about the 9/11 survivors who are going to lose their benefits, so that we don’t talk about the price of eggs that is through the roof that he had promised to slash on day one, so that we don’t talk about Jocelyn Carraco, the 11-year-old girl in Texas who died by suicide because she was being bullied at her school. 11 years old, she was being bullied by being told that her parents were going to be taken away by ICE.”
“The View” airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC.
