‘The View’: Alyssa Farah Griffin Has a Theory About Trump & Musk’s Relationship

Amanda Bell February 19, 2025, 11:50 am

Comments

Ever since the start of Donald Trump‘s second administration, The View hosts have continued to react to his various executive actions (and the congressional or judicial responses, or lack thereof, to them). But the one name that keeps making it to the top of the “Hot Topics” list in this term is Elon Musk, and that continued to be the case on Wednesday’s (February 19) episode.

This time, the cohosts — Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin, and Alyssa Farah Griffin (since Whoopi Goldberg was out) — reacted to footage of Trump and Musk’s joint interview with Sean Hannity at Fox News.

The segment started by reviewing a clip in which Musk said of his relationship with Trump, “I love the president. I think President Trump is a good man,” and Trump responded with, “Elon called me. He said, ‘You know they’re trying to drive us apart.’ I said, ‘Absolutely’ … I wanted to find someone smarter than him. I searched all over. I just couldn’t do it.”

A visibly disgusted Behar then reacted with, “They should have had this on Valentine’s Day!”

'The View' Cohosts Predict Trump Will Turn on Elon Musk After Oval Office Meeting

Behar went on to elaborate on the story and quote Steve Bannon, a former advisor in Trump’s first administration who had his own controversial theories and plans for the executive branch but called Musk “a parasitic illegal immigrant” who “wants to impose his freak experiments and play act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions.”

“That’s from Bannon,” a stunned Behar added before turning the floor over to her cohosts.

Haines surprised herself by agreeing with Bannon’s words, adding that she was unhappy with the slash-and-dash approach Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has on federal agency terminations. “I agree with Steve Bannon. That rarely happens, but on this, I do agree with him. Trump ran on helping the people that voted him in, and what he’s doing in there now is he’s breaking for the corporate greed area, which is, ‘I’m going to give tax breaks to people that can afford it more than anyone else.'”

Hostin harped once more on the fact that Musk is not elected or Senate confirmed and predicted that the Supreme Court might side with her on the illegality of DOGE, citing an opinion from prominent Republican justice Antonin Scalia.

But Griffin had a different take on the matter entirely. Since her professional background includes having worked in the first Trump administration, she offered this perspective: “There’s sort of this narrative that Elon Musk is the shadow president, and Donald Trump is kind of taking a backseat. Actually, knowing Donald Trump, I see it very differently. I think he loves that the wealthiest man on the planet is essentially an unpaid staffer for him.”

As she has said before, though, she doesn’t expect the honeymoon period between the two billionaires to last.

“Where I think that this relationship could end up breaking down the road is that Donald Trump was elected on some very clear things: bringing down the cost of living, bring down the cost of groceries, secure the border,” she said. “It was not gutting entire federal agencies, maybe making it harder to get your VA benefits, maybe making it harder to get your Social Security checks. When that starts becoming more and more unpopular… [Trump] is going to scapegoat him and he will kind of have the right to do that. So I think that there’s this period that we’re going to see in the next couple of months in this country where the effects of these broad-based slashing of the federal government, we actually feel it.”

Behar concluded the segment with a rather colorful metaphor, saying, “I was reading something about turtles. When you put turtles in an aquarium, and you don’t feed them for a while, they will start to each other. That’s what’s going on right now.”

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