‘The View’: Joy Behar Has an Emotional Reaction to Joe Biden’s Farewell Address

Amanda Bell January 16, 2025, 12:06 pm

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President Joe Biden delivered his final Oval Office address on Wednesday night, and his farewell words of both hope and worry for the country’s future had a major impact on the cohosts of The View during Thursday’s (January 16) show — Joy Behar in particular.

“I miss him,” Behar immediately said after reviewing a clip of Biden’s speech. Then, without naming Donald Trump directly, she compared the outgoing president with the one who’s about to take office again. “He spent the last 50 years caring about the country. This other one spent 50 years scamming everybody, trying to stay out of jail. You know who I’m talking about.”

Behar’s reaction continued on a more personal note when she said, “I feel like we were safe, like I didn’t have to worry was everything gonna blow up. I could live my life while he was there [in office]. Now, every day I wake up and I worry, ‘What is this guy gonna do next?'”

She then went on to touch on the specific area of concern from Biden that “oligarchs” are seizing unchecked power in America and had a stern warning for them to start sharing their wealth: “Do they think they’re going to live forever? These people. Everybody dies, I hate to break it to them.”

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The entire panel then erupted into a spirited discussion about the continued influence of billionaire tech and social media moguls like Elon Musk (owner of Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla), Jeff Bezos (owner of Amazon and the Washington Post), and Mark Zuckerberg (owner of Meta/Facebook).

“This is an important issue that Biden raises … this sort of rise of the corporate tech oligarchy, where the powerful and wealthy are getting more powerful and wealthy, while the rest of us are just kind of sitting back like, ‘Okay, how is this going to work?'” Alyssa Farah Griffin said.

Sara Haines was particularly animated about the issue and said, “When you think of an oligarchy, you think of all the billions of dollars surrounding Donald Trump right now, and he’s kind of the gatekeeper of the country. All the power is with him. The scary part is these people aren’t billionaires because they created, like, the zipper. They hold our attention for hours a day on addictive devices where we cannot get any regulation. So they not only surround the man and have access to power — because money is power, power is everything right now — it’s the fact that they run companies that own our souls right now, especially our young people. And no one will take a step towards helping protect that.”

Sunny Hostin said the only way anything will change is for the Supreme Court to reverse its ruling in Citizens vs. United, which protected corporate political contributions as free speech and opened the floodgates to dark money donations. And Whoopi Goldberg suggested, in a bit of a winding aside, that it’s the responsibility of American parents to monitor their children’s internet usage, saying, “If you’ve got kids who are lost to the internet, you’ve got to rescue them because the government’s not going to do it for you.”

The View, Weekdays, 11 a.m. ET, ABC