‘The View’ Cohosts React to Trump Administration’s Strike Plan Texting Scandal (VIDEO)

Amanda Bell March 25, 2025, 12:53 pm

Whoopi Goldberg has often said that she is an actress first, despite her day job as moderator and cohost of The View, and on Tuesday’s (March 25) show, she reminded audiences of that fact in a different way than usual.

While introducing the first “Hot Topic” of the day, which was of course the jaw-dropping national security blunder involving several top-tier members of Donald Trump‘s administration, she channeled a Valley girl persona to mock the debacle. First, she reviewed footage of coverage of the situation — in which, essentially, Jeffrey Goldberg (who Whoopi joked was her “cousin”), the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was accidentally included in a Signal text chain where the secretary of Defense and other high echelon officials discussed international attack plans in Yemen in real time. Then, she rolled clips of the Republicans’ attempts to spin and defend the muck-up and compared the comments to the hard-nosed stances the same people involved took against Hillary Clinton in 2016 over her emails.

In response to a comment by current DNI head Tulsi Gabbard that national security leaks were criminal and would be treated as such, Goldberg said in full vintage California beach teen tone, “So the question is, is she going to live up to this promise? What should happen here? Should we be saying, ‘Lock them up?'”

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACCIDENTALLY TEXTS MILITARY PLANS: After top White House officials accidentally added a journalist from ‘The Atlantic’ on a group text chain to discuss secret war plans in Yemen, #TheView co-hosts weigh in. pic.twitter.com/m3WBltj8yS

— The View (@TheView) March 25, 2025

Sunny Hostin then kicked off the substantive responses from the panel and argued why the people involved ran afoul of several laws with their actions, despite Trump’s team saying, essentially, “Nothing to see here.” She also praised Jeffrey Goldberg for his handling of the unexpected situation involving sensitive details about a strike, saying, “Just two hours after Goldberg received the details of the attack on March 15, the U.S. began launching a series of air drops against targets… So to all saying, ‘Is this accurate?’ The reporter has the receipts, and the reporter, although having the receipts, didn’t even write the details down in The Atlantic, which means he handled the national security information more appropriately than the people that are tasked with protecting this information.”

Alyssa Farah Griffin also thought credit was due to the reporter involved, saying, “Credit to Goldberg for not responding with a face palm emoji. That was the first thing I was thinking. He didn’t think it was real. He thought it was disinformation or something to trick him.” She went on to speak from her own experience working in the Pentagon about how conversations like the one he was inadvertently privy to are actually supposed to go. She then offered advice, saying, “If you are going to start a text chain with national security secrets, don’t name it what you’re doing. They called it the ‘Houthis PC Small Group.’ That’d be like if they put on Obama’s calendar, like, ‘Osama Bin Laden raid at 12 o’clock.'”

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Sara Haines predicted there would be no consequences for anyone involved, despite the severity of the matter, saying, “Do I think anything will happen? I don’t. Because we have watched the way Donald Trump handles classified information for years. He was indicted on charges in 2017 he disclosed classified information to Russian government representatives. He’s kicked translators out of rooms. In 2019, he tweeted classified satellite imagery of an Iranian site revealing highly sensitive information… He hasn’t cared. And I think some of that comes from a lot of people that understand the consequences of this have served in the military, which is why this is really rich, because about four of these people were military. They were public servants…. He’s never dealt with consequences, so he doesn’t understand that this stuff can put not only our lives at danger, but our national security. And for an administration that rode on the message of national intelligence, it is also rich that we are watching this play out, and I don’t think anything’s going to happen.”

Goldberg closed out the conversation with a message to the people who are lying about and trying to cover up the mishap: “Stop saying it didn’t happen because we’re not dumb.” With that, it’s clear why she used the Valley girl accent to ironically address the matter in the first place.

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