The View Booked Ted Cruz and Had to Beg for Silence

Whoopi Goldberg cut off boos at Ted Cruz’s name on The View on September 9, before the senator walked out. It was day two of Season 30, and she reached for Barbara Walters to quiet a room the show has been managing for years.

Cruz was there to sell a Clarence Thomas book and talk a Republican midterm convention in Texas that night. The mention of his name was enough. The walk-on later drew applause. A letter grade for President Trump did not.

Whoopi Goldberg Shut the Boos Down Cold

Goldberg was opening Hot Topics with the convention lineup when it happened. Donald Trump was the headliner. Vice President JD Vance and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were on the bill. So was “our guest later on in the show, Senator Ted Cruz.” The groans started before she finished the sentence.

She raised a finger. “Uh-uh. No, no, no, no.” Then she put the founder on the table, and the crowd clapped for Walters, who died in 2022.

Look, this is a place where Barbara Walters made sure that anybody who wanted to come and have a good conversation could come. So we want people to come, and we want to engage them. We don’t agree with them always. We don’t gel with them always, but we are respectful, and I know you will be too. I know you will be, because sometimes stuff, it’s like a burp, it comes out, so just swallow it back down.

Whoopi Goldberg, moderator, The View, September 9, 2026

ABC had already billed the hour as a mash-up: Ted Cruz and Lizzo on Wednesday, with the flute set waiting after the politics. The network still calls the series America’s most-watched daytime talk show. Goldberg’s job, in that first minute, was to keep the live risers from stepping on the booking.

She had to do it again before she brought him out. “Since Day 1, this table has been open to anyone who wants to have a respectful conversation about issues, no matter what side of the aisle they’re on,” she said, then introduced the senator as the author of Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas.

An A Grade, Then a Roomful of Groans

After the first break, Cruz came out to light applause and no boos. The scold had held the door. It did not hold the hour.

THE INTERVIEW BEATS

• The midterms: Cruz said the map looks hard for Republicans, which co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin later called a semi-admission the party may not perform well.
• The letter grade: Sunny Hostin pushed him for a mark on the economy and prices; after batting away a D and a C, he gave Trump an A, and the room groaned.
• The book fight: Hostin said she had read the Thomas biography and thought it was great, then attacked how it treats affirmative action, with Goldberg jumping in.

Joy Behar opened the political block by needling Trump’s standing, saying his disapproval ratings were “lower than my boobs at this point.” Hostin then asked for the grade. Cruz talked around it until she boxed him in.

“I would give him an A,” he said. The hosts and the risers answered together. “No. No, come on. Come on, it’s us,” Behar told him. Griffin added that it was “just us girls.” Cruz did not move.

“I recognize that the day he came in, you guys didn’t like him, and you still don’t like him,” he said. “That’s okay. That’s the beauty of democracy. You can have different views.”

Griffin, speaking later on the show’s Behind the Table podcast with executive producer Brian Teta, said she did not believe the A. She thought Cruz was already hearing a 2028 clip in his head. Teta called the hour an “iconic View” episode, a political guest jammed against a live Lizzo number. “It was crazy,” he said.

Since 2022, This Crowd Has Booed Conservatives

Goldberg’s burp line sounded like a one-off host note. It was a rerun. The same room has been walking conservative guests into a live veto for four years, and she has been the one sent out to stop it on camera.

THE VIEW AUDIENCE, 2022 TO 2026

1. October 24, 2022: Climate protesters in the Manhattan risers interrupt Cruz’s last visit; Goldberg tells them to leave so the panel can “do our job,” then throws to commercial.
2. May 2023: The crowd boos New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu over guns; Goldberg says “No, no booing,” and Behar warns, “No Republican will ever come back here if you’re going to boo.”
3. June 2026: Some audience members sit on their hands as Vice President JD Vance walks out for a book interview, while the six co-hosts stand.
4. September 9, 2026: Boos hit Cruz’s name before he appears; Goldberg cites Walters, compares the noise to a burp, and gets applause on the walk-on, then groans on the A.

The Sununu tape is the closest cousin. Goldberg told that crowd the show needed to hear people even when they were not “thinking in the right way.” Three years later she was still teaching the same lesson on Season 30’s second day. Vance got a quieter version of the snub in June, no boos, just withheld claps. Cruz got the loud one, then the polite one, then the groan.

Meghan McCain, when she held the conservative chair, said the studio crowd booed her too. The risers are not a random New York mix. They are part of the broadcast, as vocal as a co-host and a lot harder to book around.

128 Liberal Guests, Then a Season 30 Experiment

The shush landed harder because of how rarely this table has seated the other side. Media Research Center associate editor Nicholas Fondacaro counted the 2025 guest book after the last new show of that year, on December 19.

MRC GUEST COUNT, 2025

MRC’s method only tags a guest who voices politics on the air, which is why 348 total names sit beside 128 liberal guests and two conservatives. The two right-leaning names were actress Cheryl Hines, in to promote a book and to defend her husband, Kennedy, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Fondacaro flagged Hines as a stretch, given her own politics. Greene was the first sitting GOP officeholder on the show since Sununu’s August 2024 visit, a later booking than the 2023 booing.

Among the 25 Democratic politicians were Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. Season 29 opened with Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Season 28 opened with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Cruz was the first political guest ABC put out front for Season 30, a break from that habit and a test of the Walters line Goldberg keeps reciting.

Behar said in 2025 that Republicans stay away because “they’re afraid of us.” Conservative bookers answered that the show ignores or rejects them. Fondacaro’s mid-year slice found 102 liberal political guests and zero conservatives through July 25. The second half of the year slowed to 26 liberals, still with almost no one from the right until Hines and Greene.

Why Did the Room Boo a Name?

They booed a name, not an answer. Cruz had not sat down, had not graded Trump, and had not defended Thomas. The sound was for the Republican who was about to sit in Walters’ chair, on a show whose live crowd has spent years being invited to treat that chair as enemy territory.

Goldberg’s speech asked the risers to hold two jobs at once. Cheer the panel’s weekday politics, then swallow it when a GOP senator walks in for a book. That is a producer problem more than a manners problem. A live audience is cheap energy on a talk show. It is also a tell. Once you train a room to hiss, you cannot turn the hiss off for one booking and call it the old View.

The clip of Goldberg shushing the crowd traveled farther than the interview behind it. The fight that followed was not really about Cruz’s IQ or his court clerkship. It was about whether a host should gag a partisan studio the program itself spent years winding up. In the days after the episode, the same booking got dragged into a separate argument about whether ABC still puts Republicans on its air at all. One hour cannot settle that. It can show what the hour costs.

Cruz did his part of the bargain. He showed up in a room that announced it did not want him, took the A-grade heat, and left a line about democracy on the table. The show did its part too, which is the part that sits oddly beside the Walters tribute: it had to plead for quiet in order to prove it still does conversation.

Hostin Called the Book Great, Then Fought the Frame

The reason Cruz was there, besides the convention tape, was the book. Sentinel, a Penguin Random House imprint, published Going Further on August 25. The hardcover runs 336 pages and is billed as an Instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Cruz wrote it off a Supreme Court clerkship for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, nine arguments at the court, and nine hours of interviews with Thomas.

Hostin had done the reading. She still hated the moral of the story.

So what I don’t understand how you handle in the book is why is the lesson from his experience that we should eliminate the remedy rather than eliminate the racism that made the remedy necessary? I don’t understand that.

Sunny Hostin, co-host, The View, September 9, 2026

The audience cheered her. Goldberg cut in with “Welcome to being Black!” She pressed Cruz on Thomas as a constitutional scholar who, she said, should remember that Black Americans “weren’t part of the Constitution” at the start. “We weren’t all equal.” Hostin asked why protections were being rolled back. Goldberg looked at the clock and killed the segment.

That was the actual argument, and it was sharper than the boos. Cruz came to sell a portrait of Thomas as a man formed by poverty in segregated Georgia, a short turn through radical politics, and a long bet on the constitutional text. The panel wanted to know why that life story, in his telling, lands on ending race-conscious remedies. Nobody resolved it. They ran out of time, which is how The View often ends a fight it is willing to start.

The Clip That Traveled Farther Than the Interview

Season 30’s second hour tried to do two shows at once. One was the tribute: Walters’ table, anyone can come, swallow the burp. The other was the show this audience already knows, the one that hissed a senator at the sound of his name and groaned when he graded the president an A.

Goldberg got the walk-on she asked for. She did not get a quiet room for the answer that mattered to her co-hosts. Cruz walked out with the democracy line and a book plug. The convention in Texas still started that night without him having to win a daytime applause cue first.

The next conservative guest will hear some version of the same speech. The risers already know their part.