‘The View’ Ladies Take Sides on the Oprah 2020 Debate

Ever since Sunday night’s Golden Globes, when Oprah Winfrey delivered a wise, empathetic, and altogether rousing speech as she accepted her Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement, there has been a low rumbling to a deafening roar about a possible Oprah presidential run in 2020. We talked about it right here yesterday, reacting to Oprah’s speech, “her confident, powerful words, her strong demeanor, her unwavering conviction,” and how that all led up to a speech that sounded, for lack of a better word, presidential. And then Oprah’s longtime partner Steadman Graham went and said “she would absolutely do it” in reference to a run at the White House in 2020, and it was off to the races.

Of course, Twitter and the pundit class blew up about it on Monday, a barrage of takes and anti-takes and responses and backlashes to the backlash. Should Democrats go ahead and elect a celebrity after spending the better part of two years decrying an unqualified celebrity like Trump? Do we need to check ourselves before drawing false equivalencies between Oprah and Trump? Does the kind of genuine enthusiasm Oprah inspires in her supporters add up to something the Democrats won’t be able to find in another candidate in 2020?

After a day of commentary, the ladies of The View unsurprisingly had a lot to say about the matter on Tuesday’s show.

Joy Behar was, perhaps unsurprisingly, all for it, making sure to mention the difference between Oprah and Trump as celebrity billionaires is that Oprah is a true self-made billionaire, while, Trump’s career was kick started by his wealthy father. One of the co-hosts, Sunny Hostin, returned to the lack of experience. “She doesn’t have any experience in politics, just like Donald Trump, and he’s set the bar so low that people are saying, ‘If Donald Trump is doing it, Oprah can do it,’ but he’s not doing a good job!”

Meghan McCain, perhaps unsurprisingly, was negative on an Oprah presidential run. After throwing a cursory compliment towards the Democratic Party’s roster of potential candidates in 2020, she said she was looking for a presidential candidate with “military service [and] political experience.”

McCain spoke out even more strongly when the women began discussing Ivanka Trump’s Monday-evening tweet that somewhat curiously praised Oprah’s speech. Ivanka caught a lot of flak on Twitter for her vague sentiment of solidarity with women while she continues to serve in the administration of her father, who has multiple accusations of sexual harrassment against him and spoke on audio tape about groping women without their consent.

But McCain wasn’t being critical of Ivanka’s support of her father, but rather her disloyalty to her father. Drawing frequent comparisons to her own experience as the daughter of a politician, McCain zeroed in on what she characterized as Ivanka’s continued desire to be welcomed into “New York liberal elite” circles (circles where McCain is of course not welcome, as she was quick to remind the audience, lest they forget her standing as the daughter of a political maverick) and wanting to have it both ways.

“Whether she likes it or not, you are attached, you are an entity, you’re no longer one person,” McCain scolded.  “The idea that you get to be separate, especially when you are working in the White House, in the West Wing, is delusional. You’re not separate, you’re never gonna be detached from what’s happening in the White House right now.”

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