“The View” studio audience members refuse to applaud JD Vance upon VP’s arrival for live interview

Key Points

• Some of The View‘s studio audience refused to clap for JD Vance as he walked out for his interview.

• While the cohosts stood to welcome Vance, several audience members were seen holding back applause.

• The View welcomed Vance as the third sitting VP to make an appearance on the air in the show’s history.

Some of The View‘s live studio audience members welcomed Vice President JD Vance to the Hot Topics table by refusing to applaud.

The sitting politician’s high-profile interview about his new book, Communion, kicked off with the cohosts standing as he made his way out to set, while some audience members were shown sitting in their seats, motionless, as others next to them applauded Vance as he greeted the cohosts.

All six View cohosts — Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Ana Navarro, Sunny Hostin, and former Donald Trump White House staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin — united on the air for the interview, with Goldberg saying at the top of the discussion, “We’ve been asking our next guest to join us for a while now, so we’re glad he’s taking us up on the offer today.”

The View audience has long voiced opposition to specific political guests. In October 2022, protesters sitting in the show’s Manhattan studio risers famously interrupted a live interview with Ted Cruz to shout about climate change.

“Excuse me, ladies. Excuse us, let us do our job. We hear what you have to say, but you’ve got to go. You’ve got to go, you’ve got to let us do our jobs,” Goldberg scolded in the moment.

In May 2023, the audience booed conservative New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu over his response to a question about gun control. Behar and Goldberg staunchly pushed back in the moment: “No Republican will ever come back here if you’re going to boo,” Behar said from the table. Goldberg advised, “We need to talk to people to find out what they’re thinking and are they thinking in the right way. He’s not going to be perfect, none of them are, but at least give people the opportunity to say what’s going on. We’ll be right back.”

Vance’s appearance on the daytime talk show came after representatives for the current presidential administration have long criticized The View panelists, who have spent years publicly condemning Vance and Trump over various policy issues and matters of personal behavior, including ICE raids and stances on LGBTQ rights. Goldberg even chastised Vance in July 2024 over his controversial “childless cat ladies” quote about left-leaning women.

Representatives for Trump at the White House have also sent several email statements to Entertainment Weekly in response to the cohosts’ criticism, including one that called Behar a “talentless hack,” another that said the president’s team felt that Navarro was “dumb” over her statements, and another that hit out at Goldberg and Hostin, specifically, as “idiots.”

Similarly, the Federal Communications Commission (headed by Trump supporter Brendan Carr) previously launched an inquiry after The View allegedly violated the long-standing “equal time” rule about broadcast interviews, which requires that political candidates in any given race be afforded an equal amount of airtime if one is interviewed during their respective race for office.

Carr’s FCC has alleged that The View broke this standard upon interviewing Texas senate candidate James Talarico, but, as many in media have pointed out, entertainment-style talk shows have long been excluded from the “equal time” rule in the past.

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Disney, The View network ABC’s parent company, recently filed a legal petition for declaratory ruling against the FCC, alleging that the agency’s actions “threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly.”

In a pre-interview discussion with Navarro on the show’s Behind the Table podcast, View producer Brian Teta expressed last week that he hoped the interview with Vance would be a “passionate debate that’s respectful.”

The View airs weekdays on ABC.

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