By the time the subject of the coronavirus came up, Joy Behar had had about enough of Ted Cruz.During his first two segments as a guest on The View Monday morning, the Republican senator from Texas denigrated The New York Times’ bombshell report on President Donald Trump’s tax returns as both fake news and irrelevant to most voters and dismissed charges of hypocrisy over the current Supreme Court fight by calling 2016 and 2020 “very different circumstances.”So when Behar asked Cruz to say whether he agrees with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ decision to open all restaurants and bars without restrictions amidst a still-surging pandemic, things got a little nasty.“Yes, we should reopen, and I actually think if you look at Florida and if you look at Texas,” Cruz said, “the death rates have been much, much lower there than for example, states like New York, New Jersey, states with Democratic governors where the death rates have been enormously through the roof.”As he proceeded to single out New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in particular, Behar interrupted him with, “I asked you about DeSantis. Answer me about DeSantis, please.” But as much as she tried to get Cruz to talk about the situation in Florida, he kept coming back to New York.“Deflection!” Behar shouted at him. “You are deflecting, sir.”At that point, Whoopi Goldberg jumped in to say, “I want to point out that had the man who is running the country right now given us this information in January when he had it, when we could have maybe done something a little differently, it might have worked differently,” referring to the revelations from Bob Woodward’s book Rage about how President Trump deliberately downplayed the virus. She added, “It’s not about whose people died more. People died, and they didn’t have to.”The interview ended with one more deflection from Cruz, who would not say whether he thought it was in “poor taste” for the National Republican Senatorial Committee to start selling “Notorious A.C.B.” t-shirts with Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s face on them just one day after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was lying in state at the U.S. Capitol.Instead of answering the question directly, Cruz briefly praised Ginsburg’s record as “one of the most consequential justices in history” before getting in one last plug for his unusually timely new book, One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History.“If you want to understand why so many millions of Americans care passionately about the Supreme Court and about justices who will protect free speech and religious liberty and the Second Amendment, I would encourage you actually to read the book I just came out with,” he said.‘The View’ Blows Up After Meghan McCain Defends Mitch McConnell’s Supreme Court ‘Hypocrisy’Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
