‘The View’: Whoopi Goldberg Plays Toldya So Game After Trump Crashes Stocks With Tariffs

Amanda Bell April 3, 2025, 11:48 am

Whoopi Goldberg and Alyssa Farah Griffin — ABC

The cohosts of The View were rather chipper when entering the stage to open Thursday’s (April 3) live episode, complimenting the clothes and coziness of the studio crowd. Unfortunately, they didn’t have good news to start the hour with as they began with a reaction to the stock market slump ensuing after Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs for almost every country — except Russia.

“The financial markets are in free-fall after You Know Who declared a trade war on countries around the world,” Whoopi Goldberg said. She then rolled tape on the select few Republicans in Congress who spoke out against the move and offered her own take right away. “It is a bad idea,” she said. “If things were done in such a way where you could follow the logic, I would be all for it … but I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t like what he’s doing.”

Joy Behar referred to the Nobel Prize-winning economists who’ve warned against Trump’s tariffs policy and said, “He knows nothing about the economy. He knows nothing about history because they tried this in 1930 and it made the Great Depression worse than ever.”

Sara Haines then pointed out that one of the places named in Trump’s tariffs list is inhabited only by penguins and joked, “I guess come the midterms, I think these guys are gonna be a little pissed off.”

Then, to support Behar’s point about the history of tariffs in America, Sunny Hostin introduced a now-viral clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in which the high school teacher taught about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and how it didn’t work and sank the U.S. into the infamous period of economic collapse. “Trump hasn’t seen Ferris Bueller to understand that past will become prologue, and really, in real terms, this could affect every single household in the United States by $5,200. That is devastating.”

“What is his game? What is he doing?” Behar wondered aloud about the strategy.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, who used to work for Trump’s first administration, then weighed in and guessed, “He’s thinking back to the 1990s, Pat Buchanan, who basically believed we could have all American jobs here, produce all our goods here. We don’t need international partners… That was wrong then. It’s 30-plus years later, it’s even more wrong now.”

Griffin then suggested that Democrats should’ve driven the message of how harmful Trump’s tariffs would be during the election, but Goldberg took issue with that suggestion. “No, nothing would’ve broken through,” she insisted. “We said all of this. We said all of it.”

After Griffin listed out a few more ways the stock market crash will impact everyday Americans, Goldberg reiterated, “Again, this is not news to the American consumer. American consumers saw and understood and for some reason didn’t realize this was part of the plan.”

“It was in Project 2025!” Hostin pointed out.

“I don’t know if they believed,” Haines added. “The people who voted for him, I don’t know if they could fully see and believe.”

“Well, they’re fully seeing and believing it now!” Goldberg responded.

“Or they believe there’s this grand plan that’s going to be on the other side. The only grand plan is if he reverses the tariffs,” Griffin concluded.

Behar, for one, guessed that it could be a bit of retaliation. “He said he was for retribution, ‘I will retaliate.’ People didn’t believe it. Well, here it is.”