“Are y’all going to let it happen?” Whoopi Goldberg said, turning toward “The View” audience, later urging, “There needs to be opposition.”

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Alyssa Farah Griffin on ‘The View’ ; Griffin and Donald Trump

Key Points

The View cohosts sounded alarm bells over Steve Bannon’s assertion that Donald Trump will have a third term.

“I find it concerning,” said former Trump staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin.

Whoopi Goldberg asked The View audience, “Are y’all going to let this happen?”

The View cohost and former Donald Trump staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin has raised serious alarm bells over her ex-boss’ teasing of a potential — and unprecedented — third term in office.

In the wake of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon telling The Economist that the current president is “going to get a third term” and that “there’s a plan” to instill him, despite the 22nd amendment prohibiting such a move, the talk show’s panel issued staunch warnings about the prospect.

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“Republicans have pretty much given him free reign up until now,” moderator Whoopi Goldberg said at the top of the Hot Topics chat on the matter, before turning toward the audience to ask,” Are they going to let this happen? Are y’all going to let it happen?”

Griffin, a Republican who worked for Trump’s communications team before resigning toward the end of his first term in office, speculated that her former boss might “challenge [the amendment] through the courts” and might argue that he could seek a third stretch in office because it wouldn’t be “consecutive terms.”

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Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Ana Navarro, Sunny Hostin, and Alyssa Farah Griffin on ‘The View’

She also noted that many judges might not oppose the matter because they’re in power only because Trump put them there, so it’s entirely “possible” that they’d side with him.

“I know Donald Trump well enough to believe this isn’t a guy who’s going to be a lame duck after the midterms,” Griffin added. “He’s not going to let the center of gravity shift to JD Vance or Marco Rubio while he fades into the distance. It’s something to keep an eye on. I find it concerning.”

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Legal expert and former prosecutor Sunny Hostin emphasized that “we put this into the Constitution for a reason,” but admitted that she’s concerned because the amendment “hasn’t been tested” in the past.

She also pointed out conservative initiatives that set a precedent for Trump to do things that haven’t been done before — including the overturning of Roe v. Wade and mass deportation raids happening around the nation, both of which many doubted would happen.

“He’s done everything that people thought he would never do,” she observed, before bringing up Trump’s controversial plan to build a ballroom atop the former site of the East Wing of the White House. “I actually have come to the conclusion that he’s most definitely going to try to remain in power. Remember, that East Wing? It’s going to take a long time to build that. He’s hooking up the White House because he doesn’t plan on leaving it.”

Goldberg said she “told y’all that years ago,” and that, “He said it, he said I want to be president for life. I heard him say it, I watched his lips move. I thought, he means this.”

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Republican panelist Ana Navarro pointed out that “a lot of people thought Joe Biden was too old to run” for office, but noted that Trump “would be 82 in 2028. We’ve all seen the swollen ankles, we’ve all seen the bruises on his hands. This is a man who’s showing his age and the health issues that often come along with being elderly.”

Navarro also accused Trump of having “authoritarian envy,” and compared him to people like Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez.

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Donald Trump on Air Force One

“He goes around to these countries that he loves, he wants the parades, he wants the arches, he wants the ballrooms, he wants to be emperor, he wants to be an authoritarian,” Navarro said. “I would say, do not fall asleep on this. Republicans, every single elected Republican, should be getting asked right now, ‘Would you be in favor or against Donald Trump running for a third term?’ If they don’t say anything, if they don’t answer, vote them out.”

Sara Haines noted that she thinks a potential third term would be “stopped in the courts,” and that “80 percent of Americans oppose this” in general.

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Still, Goldberg said that “he doesn’t care what we think. He’s going to do this,” and said he’ll try to find a loophole around the Constitution. “Not consecutive, consecutive, it doesn’t really matter. If he wants to do it and there’s no opposition, he’s going to do it. There needs to be opposition. People have to make decisions around the country about who they’re voting into office.”

She finished the segment by looking into the camera to say, “You’re not going to know until we know. And that’s always the bitch.”

When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly asks Entertainment Weekly via email, “Who cares?”

The cohosts of The View have long spoken out against Trump and his administration, both during his first term and the current one. Griffin worked for Trump in 2020, before resigning and subsequently speaking out against him ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

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Given her experience with Trump, Griffin was even interviewed by prosecutors in a probe into the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.

According to a transcript from Griffin’s 2022 interview with prosecutors among the Jan. 6 committee, she spoke about Trump’s demeanor following his 2020 election loss.

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“I popped into the Oval [Office] just to, like, give the President the headlines and see how he was doing. And he was looking at the TV and he said, ‘Can you believe l loss [sic] to this effing guy?’ And then just kind of moved forward. But in that moment I think he knew he lost, but I believe now, I think he thinks it was stolen from him,” she said in her interview. “I think there’s a level of delusion, of confirmation bias, of surrounding himself by only information that matches what he wants to hear and believe. And I really do think he believes it was stolen. I think many people around him do as well.”