ABC's 'The View' Helps Chelsea Clinton Sell Her Mom As Honest and Trustworthy

September 9th, 2016 11:58 PM

ABC's The View welcomed Chelsea Clinton to the set on Friday. It was nothing like the hardballs Ann Romney and her sons endured four years ago. It was nothing like John McCain in 2008 being asked by Whoopi Goldberg eight years ago "Do I have to be worried about becoming a slave again?" It was like a gushing tea with a princess. Everyone aimed to make Chelsea look positive, poised, and substantive.

The most obsequious spot was when Whoopi Goldberg tried to help Chelsea sell her mother as honest and trustworthy -- suggesting that it must be people who "don't know her" who have that opinion:

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: One of the biggest critiques of your mom made by lots of people who don't know her or who have not met her is that she is untrustworthy. As a daughter, when you hear that, knowing all the things you've sort of had to deal with with your parents but particularly with your mom, how do you feel when you hear that?

CHELSEA: It doesn't make sense to me. That's probably not such a surprise. With my husband, there's no one I trust more than my mom. I said something publicly which I realized I hadn't said before but is so deeply, deeply true, that if God forbid if anything were to happen to Mark and me, my mother would take care of my children. [applause]

There's no greater vote of trust and faith and love than that. So as a daughter, it doesn't make sense to me. I also think as someone who has been so lucky to be kind of at a ringside seat to my mom's public service career, it's not a new criticism. Some of my earliest memories are from when my dad was running for re-election in governor of Arkansas in 1986 and he was running against a man named frank white who truly represented the worst of Arkansas's past. He had been a governor of Arkansas before.

He was an active segregationist, he opposed Brown v. Board of Education. Even though he’s running against my dad, he spent a lot of the campaign attacking my mom and attacking her for not being trustworthy because she spent so much time working outside the home, and so she must, therefore, be a terrible mother.

Thankfully, even though I was six, I knew that was crazy. I didn't have any sisters, Joy, you weren't in my life yet. I knew that as an only child I got the first and last word on my mom as a mom. So, for me, I’ve heard these attacks for so long and my mom keeps pushing for and fighting for and standing up for what she fundamentally believes, that until every child in our country has the right to give up to his or her God-given potential, our work is not yet done.

Chelsea can make this little speeches for two minutes and no one actually mentioned specifics about private e-mail servers and all of the lies she told.

The interview began with Chelsea being asked twice if she felt NBC’s Matt Lauer was unfair to her mother. She just deflected that about how proud she was of her mom, and no one mentioned that Lauer was her colleague at NBC News when the was making $600,000 for doing not very much reporting.

Joy Behar expressed her usual frustration about how this election shouldn’t be close, since Hillary is “more qualified than anybody. Your father and president Obama both said she's more qualified than they are. And on the other side you've got this rogue candidate who basically has done nothing in politics who seems to not be informed on a lot of things.”

The only questions approaching actual journalism came from Paula Faris, who asked Chelsea if she was staying with the Foundation, which drew a yes -- amidst a blur of blabber about all of the wonderful work the foundation does in saving lives. Sara Haines helped Chelsea whack Trump for his "normalization of hate speech":

SARA HAINES: Donald Trump recently said that he didn't think your mom looked presidential. What do you have to say to that?

CHELSEA: I mean, do I even need to say anything? I think that that sort of stands, um, on its own.

I've been so much more troubled in this campaign about what he has said about women broadly, about Americans with disabilities, about our veterans, about Americans who don't kind of share his straight white male heritage. [Applause] That to me is far more worrying than his sort of thinly or not so thin veiled sexism towards my mom. She's tough, she can take it.

I was in Pennsylvania this week, as I was sharing, and I met a mother who told me a story that broke my heart then and continues to just stay with me. She said her son is in middle school and he immigrated with his family to this country from Guatemala when he was six months old. School started recently in Pennsylvania, and already he's had multiple people come up to him and say, you should go back to Mexico. That to me is a consequence of the almost normalization of hate speech that we're witnessing in this election. And so, that to me, is what is so deeply troubling about what Mr. Trump and so many of his surrogates say online, off line, because our kids are listening.