The co-hosts of “The View” on Tuesday came out strongly against Donald Trump’s plan for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States.
“As a Christian I will always fight for religious freedoms, but as a Christian, we have to fight for all religious freedoms,” Candace Cameron-Bure said. “Listen, if the government can shut down one group, they can shut down all the groups. So if you shut down a mosque, you can just as easily shut down a church, a synagogue, anyplace, so think about it.”
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg then recalled the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, who famously wrote, “Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out,” an indictment of people’s failure to stop the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
“Listen, this is still America,” Goldberg said. “You know, I know that y’all were applauding him. You love him out there, wherever he was talking. But this is still America and you’re not going to win this.”
Co-host Joy Behar then wondered aloud if Trump is really serious about running, and recalled a recent encounter she claims to have had with him last month in New York City.
“When I saw him at the Adele concert, I said, ‘Do you really want to do this, Donald?’” Behar said. “And he said, ‘Can you believe the polls?’ He’s fascinated with the fact that people are in love with him. He talks about the thousands who came to see him. It’s a narcissistic disorder.”
“What is sadder to me than everything are the folks that were there cheering,” Goldberg said of Trump’s speech announcing the plan.
“Everybody has fought to make their place in the sun and to suddenly come out with this kind of B.S. rhetoric that I thought was gone after people got beaten in Alabama. I thought we were ahead of this, and it just broke my heart to see that we are still pissing in the wind.”