“The View” host Whoopi Goldberg interrupted the conversation to scold the audience for booing Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to former President Donald Trump.
Conway joined the ABC midday talk show on Tuesday to discuss her new book, “Here’s the Deal,” that just hit the shelves – and the conversation turned to the 2020 election and Trump’s disbelief that he could have lost to President Joe Biden.
Whoopi Goldberg scolds the audience for booing while @KellyannePolls is talking.
Conway quips: "I think they're booing Biden staying in the basement." pic.twitter.com/F9VcGzLkRv— Virginia Kruta (@VAKruta) May 24, 2022
“I want to talk to you about the “big lie” and is the stolen election,” co-host Sunny Hostin began the segment with a direct question for Conway.
“The Russian collusion illusion?” Conway pushed back prompting a few laughs from the audience. “Three years. Three years worth.”
“Um, no, well, there are a lot of lies,” Hostin said. “Because I think by tend of the term Donald Trump had accumulated 30,570 lies during his presidency, but I want to talk about the big lie. The stolen election. You write that Trump was more shocked about losing in 2020 than he was about winning in 2016, that he couldn’t comprehend how he lost to Joe Biden. People around him lied to him and told him he won. Did you lie to him about winning?”
“Never,” Conway said.
“Can you agree that he lost both the popular vote and Electoral College?” Hostin asked.
“It’s pretty obvious that Joe Biden is the president, I can’t believe we’re still talking about this, respectfully,” Conway pushed back, and the co-hosts began talking over each other.
“Hold on. I write extensively in this book that I am the closest person to Donald Trump to tell him the earliest he came up short,” Conway continued. “It broke my heart. I wanted him to get re-elected.”
Conway went on to suggest that Trump’s campaign team had effectively wasted millions of dollars when she believed they should have been able to win reelection based on his policies and accomplishments.
“He should have won huge, he had all these accomplishments. He’s running against a guy who’s stuck in the basement, and you’re in the middle of the pandemic –”
The audience began to boo then, and Goldberg interrupted.
“Let me — Let me do something before you say anything else,” Goldberg said, turning to address the audience directly. “Listen, this is ‘The View.’ And this is her view and she’s talking about how she feels and what she knows, please don’t boo her.”
“I think they’re booing Biden staying in the basement,” Conway quipped with a smile.
“Why does he continue to lie about it then?” Hostin asked.
“President Trump was told again and again by people in his campaign, ‘You’re going to win in a landslide,'” Conway replied. “After he was coming up short, they were saying ‘there’s a way we can do this.'”
Conway went on to note that what she had told him privately was not different than what she had said publicly — that until the election was certified on December 14, he had the right to amass whatever evidence he could of any potential fraud.