‘The View’: Joy Behar Calls Trump’s Chicago Threats a ‘Distraction’

Amanda Bell September 8, 2025, 12:26 pm

The second “Hot Topic” of the day on Monday’s (September 8) Season 29 premiere of The View was the news that Donald Trump and his administration renamed the Department of Defense the “Department of War” and announced his intention to send troops into the city of Chicago, Illinois, with a meme of himself in the theme of Apocalypse Now.

The cohosts were all mostly agreed that it was an inappropriate action for the administration to take, but Joy Behar had a unique take on the matter.

“All of this is a big distraction from the fact that his approval rating is in the toilet right now. 52% of Americans say the economy is getting worse. 24% say it’s getting better. Also, the Epstein thing hangs over his head,” she said, evoking the continued controversy about the Trump administration’s handling of the files for the convicted child sex trafficker Trump had a long and well-documented friendship with.

Behar also said the whole thing ran counter to what Trump campaigned on, policy-wise. “Didn’t he run on being an anti-war candidate? The MAGA people who voted for him, one of the reasons they liked him is because he was against war. He took on Bush, I guess that didn’t include war against your own people, your own country.”

Alyssa Farah Griffin also contended that it was a political move for Trump to be marching troops into major American cities. “You can’t separate the politics from this. The midterms are coming. I think Trump has had the Senate of having control of the House, the Senate and the White House, and what he’s trying to do, and I caution Democrats, he’s trying to goad them into saying, ‘There is no problem with crime in this whole country,'” she explained. “Chicago, for example [over the] weekend, eight people were murdered, and 25-plus people were hit with stray bullets. That deserves a response … It should be in coordination with the federal government. It should be the state and local officials that should lead it. But he has this way of speaking to people’s anxieties, and when they feel like they’re not safe in their communities, regardless of what the macro stats say, he taps into that it’s the grievance.”

Ana Navarro had a different take, offering that it wasn’t about protecting the communities. “They want to round up immigrants. They want to conquer crime and immigration. They want to terrorize vulnerable communities,” she said.

Sara Haines added that the use of National Guard troops in U.S. cities “is not effective… What would be more effective is not treating the symptom but the root causes. They could take the equal amount of money that they’ve dispensed into D.C. and house every homeless person…. It’s less about solutions and more about politics.”

Sunny Hostin echoed Haines’ point and noted, “People should know that the National Guard, it costs us taxpayers $1 million a day to have them there. And you see what they’re doing, and they’re picking up trash, they’re picking up letters. That is not why I think our members of Armed Forces join to serve. They don’t join to serve to police citizens. They join to serve to protect our country from outside forces, right? So that, in and of itself, is a problem.” She also said that there are better ways to address the root cause than sending troops. “I don’t like crime. I think we need to do a much better job, but not necessarily militarizing the police. Let’s aid the police. Let’s send people that have mental health training so that we can help people that are emotionally disturbed. Let’s have people that are better doctors that can help with mental health. Again, let’s also do something about affordable housing because we know that people can’t live. Why can’t we use some of that million dollars to feed people because people are hungry?”

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Whoopi Goldberg closed out the chat with a note of her own, saying, “If they actually cared about hungry people, we would have never seen anyone burn $29 million [in food],” referencing the government’s action in July to burn 500 metric tons of food that was initially gathered as foreign aid.

The View, weekdays, 11 a.m. ET, ABC