Star Jones Joins ‘The View’ and Reacts to ‘Cray Cray’ Trump Gaza News

Amanda Bell February 5, 2025, 11:39 am

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On Wednesday’s (February 5) episode of The View, there was a very special guest at the table. Joining Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin, and Alyssa Farah Griffin (while Joy Behar was again absent) was former cohost Star Jones! And Jones didn’t miss a beat when it came to tackling the “Hot Topic” of the day.

“It’s nice to be back. This is some new stuff. Looks a little different. Table looks a little different, but the camaraderie is the same,” Jones said after Goldberg introduced her.

Then, the panelists hopped right into discussing the latest news surrounding — who else? — Donald Trump, in which he declared that the United States will begin to occupy and develop Gaza.

After rolling footage of both Trump’s statement (which took place in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no less), Goldberg offered the first reaction, saying, “It really seemed like nobody was more surprised than the guy standing next to him. Did you see Netanyahu’s face?!”

Griffin then admitted that when she first heard about this issue, she thought it was “fake news,” telling her husband to check his sources before buying into such stories. Once she realized it was real, though, she disparaged the notion altogether. “It’s not giving ‘America First’ or ending endless wars, which, by the way, was one of actually the things that made Trump popular in the first place. He was the anti-George Bush, the anti-‘We’re going to be in the Middle East indefinitely, having US troops there.’ So horrible idea.”

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However, Griffin also theorized that this was just another bit of “Trump bluster” that was either meant to be a distraction from other controversies, a consequence of his real estate developer mindset, or an over-the-top starting out point to make his eventual actions have less of a sting.

Haines then chimed in to point out that the basis of the deadly conflict between Israel and Hamas in the first place was due to their shared sense of ownership over the Gaza Strip and added, “What I don’t understand is he said, ‘Everyone that I mentioned this to thought it was a good idea.’ He only surrounded himself with yes people because he didn’t want to know if it was a bad idea… But the people that put him in office are not gonna like this. This is not MAGA. MAGA is more isolationist, ‘shut the borders off, don’t let anyone in, and let’s not get involved in anything abroad.'”

“No one supports this,” Haines continued. “Terrorism is the problem in the Middle East. That’s what people are fighting. The number one way to put a target on the U.S.’s back is to haul in there that is a recruiting line of, ‘Let’s go get them.’ So that does not play to the national security he keeps riding on.”

Hostin was next up to speak and said that Trump lacks the “legal authority” to do this and that he would meet resistance from all corners. She also offered her legal opinion on the matter, saying, “Expelling a people from their land so that America or Israel can take it is a war crime. It’s against international criminal law. And what was really striking to me is that we have one on the one side, this 34-count convicted felon. And on the other side, we have a man who the International Criminal Court has warrants out for war crimes and crimes against humanity… And so you have sort of one alleged criminal and one convicted criminal making plans that are illegal.”

Then, Jones got her turn at the metaphorical mic and added, “I mean, it’s day 16 of Trump 2.0, and it’s just typical of him to throw a bunch of cray cray up against the wall so that it distracts you from what’s really going on, and the federal employees that are scared, that don’t know if they’re going to have a job, if they’re going to have their retirement and civil rights being diminished and human rights being diminished… and the media is playing into it, in my opinion. I mean, you’re allowing foolishness to distract us from facts and what is going on. It used to have people stand on the corner and just be crazy at Times Square. Now they’re all over the place.”

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