Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s Return to The View Is Interrupted by Trump’s Remarks on Iran

Hasselbeck was a panelist on the talk show from 2003 to 2013 and famously butted heads with Rosie O’Donnell during a 2007 episode

After more than a decade away, Elisabeth Hasselbeck returned to The View as a guest panelist — and viewers were eager to see how the reunion would unfold. But the conversation quickly shifted when remarks about Iran from former President Donald Trump entered the discussion. The unexpected pivot changed the tone of the segment almost instantly.

Hasselbeck, 48, is slated to co-host the ABC talk show for a week amid Alyssa Farah Griffin’s maternity leave (Griffin welcomed her first child on Feb. 10 with her husband Justin Griffin) and she made her debut on Monday, March 2.

She joined Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Ana Navarro and Sunny Hostin on the show, and Goldberg, 70, introduced her as “our friend, former co-host, all-around great gal.”

“I’m so thankful to be here with you all. This is really a gift,” Hasselbeck, who was a panelist from 2003 to 2013, said. “Whoopi, we go way back. We go way back. It’s a blessing to be near you anytime that I can.”

She gave kudos to the panel, whom she said do “a great job,” as she reflected on how relevant it is “to have voices as women in the world right now, forever reminded of the gift of our freedoms.”

“We might have differences of opinion, but we love each other and we’re stronger for it,” she said. “Whoopi, we’ve said it before: we can hold our positions in one hand and each other’s hands in the other.”

“So we get to do that all week. It might get a little spicy at times, but we do not hate each other, we love each other.”

The first topic addressed by the panel was President Donald Trump’s military strikes against Iran, which took place in a joint effort with Israel on Saturday, Feb. 28, and killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hasselbeck shared a different perspective compared to the other panelists on the strikes, and disagreed particularly with Navarro, 54, and Hostin, 57, but the episode — which went on to feature an interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal — was later cut short as Trump, 79, made remarks on Iran from the White House during a Medal of Honor ceremony.

During the panelists’ discussion on Trump’s military strikes against Iran, Hasselbeck said, “Understandably, Americans are fatigued with the idea of war. We get that, we sit here and we know the repercussions of that, including the death, and I do wanna say, our hearts are with the families of those fallen soldiers. Your sacrifice will not be squandered. This war will be won.”

She went on to say that Ayatollah Khamenei’s death means that “we have 47 million Iranian women who now have a hope of freedom” and “we have a disgusting, disgusting terrorist regime ended, and the people finally have hope to create their own nation again.”

“When we zoom out, in [the] geo-political realm, which is not my specialty either, but I have a ton of friends in the military who specialize in this, we see that this is actually avoiding a boots-on-the-ground war with China,” she claimed. “When we are able to choke their oil supply and our president and the military are exemplary in doing so right now… And now what that does is, presumably, prevent China from having an absolute stronghold on the globe. So, this is a strategic move, geo-politically, that we may not fully understand, but I absolutely trust that this is best for our nation.”

Hostin disagreed with Hasselbeck, as she said, “The bottom line is that this is an illegal war. This is an unconstitutional war — only Congress can wage war and declare war.”

In his remarks on Monday, Trump claimed that the ongoing U.S. military operations against Iran were made “to eliminate the grave threats posed to America by this terrible terrorist regime.”

He said the U.S. had “warned Iran not to make any attempt to rebuild” its nuclear program after U.S. strikes in June “blew up” what the regime had, but “they ignored those warnings and refused to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

“In addition, the regime’s conventional ballistic missile program was growing rapidly and dramatically, and this posed a very clear, colossal threat to America and our forces stationed overseas,” Trump said.