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A friendship with Donald Trump was costly for Barbara Walters and The View long before he ever became President of the United States. An upcoming book, The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters by Susan Page, chronicles how the media pioneer’s complicated New York society relationships often interfered with what happened at the “Hot Topics” table.
Rosie O’Donnell joined the show in September 2006, after replacing longtime moderator Meredith Vieira. The transition was smooth, but the bliss didn’t last too long. The infamous feud started when O’Donnell exaggerated that Donald Trump had gone belly up. While the then-real estate mogul had three business bankruptcies on the books at the time, he had no personal bankruptcies in his financial history. She claimed during a segment that he was a “snake oil salesman” who “left the first wife, had an affair. He inherited a lot of money, and he’s been bankrupt so many times, where he didn’t have to pay.”
Of course, he took issue with the comment while watching the show from Trump Towers and called into the show with threats to sue ABC, The View, and the two women. It was Walters who reportedly came to the rescue to smooth his ruffled feathers. Per an excerpt from the Daily Mail, Donald Trump gossiped that Walters didn’t love working with O’Donnell and it was like “living in hell” when they were together on The View. He also claimed in an open letter to the New York Post, via CBS News,that the journalist said, the comedian “won’t be here for long” and insinuated that a firing was imminent.
Walters issued a statement and it felt like she sided with Donald Trump in a feud that is still going on to this day between the former president and the comedian. “Rosie didn’t feel she (Walters) adequately defended her when she was under attack,” Page wrote in her book. “She also didn’t accept at face value Barbara’s carefully worded statement about what she had said to Trump in that phone call.”
It wasn’t hard to predict what came next as O’Donnell reportedly felt “betrayed” by her boss, who was deep into the Manhattan “rich money club,” which included Donald Trump. It took a month before Walters and O’Donnell met face-to-face on the set of The View, and it wasn’t pretty. Things got so heated that O’Donnell called Walters a “f***ing liar” for not defending her in the fight, even though they played nice anytime the cameras were on — it was their Oscar-winning moment. O’Donnell revealed to Page that she told Walters how “disappointed and shocked and hurt I was” because “she couldn’t stand up for me.” She added, “I felt very betrayed about her going behind my back and speaking to Donald Trump in Trumpian language.”
The Donald Trump argument was only one of the reasons (the Elisabeth Hasselbeck-Iraq War fight was the final nail in the coffin) why O’Donnell departed the show at the end of the 2007 season, but it’s clear that Walters had a tricky web of social relationships that often impacted the well-being of The View.
Click here to see all the times Donald Trump has gone off about celebrity women’s looks.
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