The View hosts agreed Friday that it was painful to re-watch Joe Biden’s performance in his disastrous 2024 debate with Donald Trump, and blamed former First Lady Jill Biden and other Democrats for missing the opportunity to have him drop out of the race sooner.

The discussion came as the co-hosts commented on Jill Biden’s recent CBS News interview where she said she was scared that her husband was having a stroke during the debate, but carried on afterward as if all was well.

“Yeah, she has to spin. That’s the only thing she can do the morning after,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin. “I’m not interested in litigating what Jill Biden did or didn’t know. I came to the table the morning after the election and was not remotely surprised that Donald Trump won.”

She continued:

There were glaring signs, I argued it at this table for two-plus years that however anyone might personally feel about Joe Biden, he was losing the country because there were concerns, not about his ability to do the job while still in office, it was that he was going to have four more years and be the oldest president in history and had seen some slowing down. Seventy-two percent of Americans said that before this debate.

And he stayed in for another month after that, which led this narrow window for Kamala Harris to try to do a hail Mary and win. A lot of why we’re here in this moment that we’re in, where a lot of us are afraid of the direction the country is going, is because people who were raising their voices and saying, “America deserves other options than this” were told to shut up, sit down and not use their voice, but stand up for democracy somehow. How are you standing up for democracy if you’re not allowed to have opinion on the state of the commander in chief?

Sara Haines said she also felt silenced on the issue.

“With what Alyssa is saying, I spoke up here and got flack when I said I thought he should step out, President Biden, early on,” Haines said. “Right after the debate I said, you know what, people have been concerned in the fact that it’s polling so high, and people are being told, ‘Shut up, don’t notice his age, it’s not a problem,’ and then it became a problem and everyone decided it was a problem.”

“It bothers me because every time we wanted to rehash this — even at this table — people said, ‘It’s over. We’re done.’ Part of the distrust as an independent that I got furious at was, ‘Don’t tell me to fall in line. That’s what the Republicans do. They fall in line with no thought or critical thinking,'” Haines said.

Watch the clip above via The View on ABC.

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