The View’s Sunny Hostin keeps calling Donald Trump deranged and unfit, and she wants his own Cabinet to show him the door.
Democrats are counting on a House majority to finish what she started.
And Kamala Harris just handed Hostin a script Democrats have read from once before.
Sunny Hostin Suddenly Found the Brake Pedal
Kamala Harris has some fresh advice for her party, and she wrapped it in the language of a budget meeting.
“Going in the direction of impeachment is not a good idea. We have limited resources. I think the energy and resources need to be put into accountability, need to be put into investigations,” Harris said in a clip The View aired in late October.
Joy Behar turned to the table. “What do you think? Do you agree?”
Hostin didn’t hesitate. “I do,” she said.
Then she drew her line. “We know that Republican Tom Massie . . . moved to impeach Pete Hegseth. That’s something I think would be appropriate because of the war. In terms of Trump, I don’t think that’s what should be on the agenda.”
Quite a pivot for a woman who sat at that same desk in early October, called the President “deranged,” and floated the 25th Amendment to push him out of office.
Think about what that means. Hostin believes Trump is unfit to serve. She wants his own Cabinet to remove him. But impeachment, the tool the Constitution actually hands the House, has somehow slipped off her to-do list.
Funny how a fatal defect turns into a scheduling problem once an election shows up on the calendar.
Hostin then talked up Hakeem Jeffries, whom she predicted would become the next Speaker, and his plan for the first 100 days, “taking care of the tax credits, limiting ICE, and also stock trades.”
Nancy Pelosi Wrote This Script Eight Years Ago
Anybody who lived through the 2018 midterms has heard this tune.
Back then, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pushed what the Washington Free Beacon described as a “No Drama Democrats” strategy, and she told megadonor Tom Steyer his impeachment ad blitz was a distraction.
In August 2018, she spelled out the reasoning to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I think the Republicans would like us to run on the subject of impeachment,” Pelosi said.
Notice what she left out. She never promised Democrats wouldn’t impeach. She only said Republicans wanted Democrats talking about it before the ballots got counted.
Her candidates took the hint. FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon Jr told CNN that summer that he and his colleagues checked the campaign websites of 811 Democrats running for House, Senate, and governor and found exactly one who mentioned impeachment.
And that one lost.
Then the new Congress arrived.
On January 3, 2019, the first day of the new Democrat majority, US Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA) and US Representative Al Green (D-TX) filed articles of impeachment against Trump. Sherman’s office made clear he had recycled the same articles he first introduced in 2017. “I have not changed the text,” he said.
So the articles existed, word for word, the entire time Democrat leaders told voters impeachment wasn’t a priority.
That same night, freshman US Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) told a room full of activists, “We’re going to impeach the ************.”
But Sherman objected only to the vocabulary. “It’s not something I would say,” he told the Associated Press, while he kept pushing the same goal.
House Democrats impeached Trump in December 2019. They did it again in January 2021, with one week left in his term.
Two impeachments. Zero convictions. One campaign promise that lasted about as long as it took to swear in a new Congress.
The Panel Let Slip What Impeachment Was Really For
Ana Navarro tried to play the grown-up at the table.
“I’m completely against impeachment,” she said. “There’s 100 other ways to hold Donald Trump and his administration accountable. Impeachment is an exercise that is moot if you don’t have the 67 votes in the Senate required to indict.”
Small problem there. The Senate doesn’t indict anybody. The House impeaches, and the Senate decides whether to convict. Navarro has watched two of these circuses up close and still mixed up the rings.
Then she gave away the game. “It’s already going to be on his obituary, ‘He was twice impeached,’” Navarro said. “What difference does thrice make?”
By Navarro’s own math, the first two bought Democrats a line in a dead man’s newspaper write-up. A strange way to describe a sacred constitutional duty.
Sara Haines piled on, warning that “to go through a lot of the ceremonial impeaching and stuff, the voters have been screwed once.”
Ceremonial. A co-host on ABC’s flagship political talk show just filed two impeachments of a sitting President under ceremony. Republicans said for years the whole exercise ran on theater, and the press treated them like cranks for saying so.
Haines also wanted “the optics of the government” to “look correct,” and she claimed voters are watching red states “flip full to blue.” Nobody has counted a single midterm ballot yet, but sure.
Joy Behar supplied the history lesson. “That’s what happened to Richard Nixon, who I dated,” she joked. “He was impeached but the Republicans went to him and said, we have the votes to convict.”
But the House never impeached Nixon. The House Judiciary Committee approved articles in July 1974, and Nixon resigned that August before the full House ever voted.
Nixon’s cover-up was real, and it cost him dearly. Still, the version Behar’s industry tells skips a chapter. Deep Throat, the secret source who fed the Washington Post, turned out to be Mark Felt, the FBI’s number two man, a career bureaucrat who lost out on the director’s chair and used the press to settle the score. The permanent Washington class decided a President had to go and grabbed every tool in the shed.
Trump has stared down the same crowd for a decade, just with fancier subpoenas.
Investigations Are the Appetizer
Harris didn’t tell Democrats to leave Trump alone. She told them to pour the “energy and resources” into “investigations.”
Anybody who remembers 2019 knows the order of the courses. Pelosi preached oversight and patience while Robert Mueller finished his work. The investigations came first, and the articles came right behind them.
And Hostin already named a first target in Hegseth, over a war President Trump keeps trying to end at the negotiating table rather than drag out for another decade.
Then comes the Jeffries agenda. “Limiting ICE” means slowing the deportations voters demanded when they sent Trump back to the White House in 2024, a policy Reuters/Ipsos polling earlier this year found majority support for.
The stock-trade item deserves a chuckle. A ban on congressional stock trading is the right call, but Democrats spent decades shrugging while their own longtime leader became the poster child for the problem. When Pelosi entered Congress in 1987, her family’s reported stock holdings ran somewhere around $610,000 to $785,000. Over her career, that portfolio reportedly produced more than $130 million in profits, a return near 16,930 percent. Democrats somehow discovered the issue once Pelosi was headed for the exit.
Maybe Hostin truly cooled on impeachment. Maybe Harris honestly frets about staff budgets. People change their minds.
But the same party made the same promise in 2018, and the plan came out of the drawer the moment voters could no longer do anything about it for two years.
In August 2018, Nancy Pelosi said Republicans wanted Democrats to run on impeachment. On January 3, 2019, the day she reclaimed the Speaker’s gavel, two House Democrats filed articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.
Sources:
Mediaite, “The View’s Sunny Hostin Says Impeaching Trump ‘Shouldn’t Be On The Agenda’ If Dems Win The Midterms”
Fox News, coverage of Sunny Hostin’s 25th Amendment remarks on The View, October 2026
San Francisco Chronicle, “Democrats not using word impeachment,” August 2018
Washington Free Beacon, “Report: Pelosi Told Steyer That His Ad Campaign Calling for Trump’s Impeachment Was a ‘Distraction’”
CNN, Inside Politics transcript, August 23, 2018
FiveThirtyEight, “Will Impeachment Talk Affect the Midterms?”
Cook Political Report, “Who Wins if Talk Turns to Impeachment”
Roll Call, “Brad Sherman to introduce impeachment articles against Trump on first day of Democratic Congress”
KABC, “Rep. Brad Sherman reintroduces impeachment articles against President Trump”
CNN, “Democratic reaction to Tlaib impeachment remarks,” January 2019
Associated Press, “Impeachment now? Trump spins Democrats’ talk as 2020 ploy”
Reuters/Ipsos polling on deportations, 2026