Elisabeth Hasselbeck walked back onto The View set for the first time in 13 years this week, and it took her approximately one segment to remind everyone why the show got rid of her in the first place. She’s too good at this.
Whoa! Somebody warn Whoopi that the Survivor girl is back and she brought receipts!
Hasselbeck is guest-hosting the show this week while Alyssa Farah Griffin is out on maternity leave. For those who don’t remember, Griffin is the current “conservative” on The View, which is a bit like calling a house cat the “predator” in a room full of parakeets. The show hasn’t had a genuinely contentious political moment since Meghan McCain left. They replaced the friction with a nice lady who agrees with everyone and calls it “balance.”
Enter Elisabeth Hasselbeck, stage right.
During a segment about DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s congressional hearing on border enforcement, the panel started doing their usual routine — calling for Noem’s resignation, clutching pearls about ICE, the whole song and dance. Hasselbeck wasn’t having it.
She rattled off the numbers: zero illegal aliens released into the country for ten straight months. Nearly three million illegal immigrants have left the United States. The lowest murder rate in 125 years. Fentanyl trafficking down 56 percent at the border. Daily border encounters down 96 percent.
Then she did the thing that broke them.
Hasselbeck turned to the studio audience and asked: “How many people in the audience here had to go through security to get here? Raise your hand.”
Every single hand went up.
“Just be honest,” she said. “Otherwise you go to jail, I guess, for illegal trespassing, right? This is an authorized audience. They had to go through security to get through the border to get right here to just hear us talk.”
The panel sat there like they’d just been told Santa isn’t real. No comeback. No rehearsed talking point. Just silence and the sound of producers frantically signaling for a commercial break.
You love to see it.
Sunny Hostin tried to recover by bringing up two people who were killed — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — arguing that “death is not a mistake.” Hasselbeck agreed that every death is a tragedy, then pointed out that Americans murdered by illegal immigrants deserve the same outrage. Hostin had no response to that either.
But the best part came after the commercial break. Whoopi Goldberg — the same Whoopi Goldberg who has spent years defending open borders on this exact show — suddenly announced that she wants “tight borders” and believes everyone in America wants “people who are not good for the country out of the country.”
Wait, what?
Whoopi Goldberg is a border hawk now? One Hasselbeck segment and Whoopi is suddenly doing her best Kristi Noem impression? That’s not a change of heart. That’s a hostage negotiation.
(We’re going to need someone to go back and compile a supercut of every time Whoopi called border enforcement “racist” over the past decade. Someone get on that.)
The whole thing is especially delicious when you remember who Elisabeth Hasselbeck is. This is the woman who got famous by surviving the Australian Outback on a reality TV show in 2001 — where she finished fourth, by the way, because apparently even nature couldn’t fully eliminate her. She then spent a decade on The View from 2003 to 2013, where her most famous moment was getting into a split-screen screaming match with Rosie O’Donnell in 2007 over the Iraq war. That fight was so brutal that Rosie quit the show the next day.
Let us repeat that. The last time Elisabeth Hasselbeck went full throttle on a View co-host, the co-host literally quit the show.
And now she’s back, and within two days she’s got Whoopi pretending to be a border security enthusiast and Sunny Hostin staring blankly into the middle distance. Joe Concha nailed it when he called her “a slight upgrade” over Griffin and predicted she won’t be invited back because she’s “far too effective.”
Here’s the funniest part. Sources told the media that ABC is “treating this very clearly as a test” for whether Hasselbeck might return in a bigger role. A test! They brought in a woman who once made Rosie O’Donnell rage-quit on live television, put her next to Whoopi and Sunny, and now they’re carefully evaluating whether she might be “too much.”
That’s like lighting a stick of dynamite and then standing over it with a clipboard saying, “Hmm, let’s see if this one’s a firecracker.”
We already know the answer, ABC. You just watched your entire panel get bodied by a woman whose career started because she was good at not getting voted off an island. Maybe that’s the skill set you need on The View — someone who knows how to survive being surrounded by people who want her gone.
Bring her back permanently. We dare you.
