ABC's "The View" co-host Joy Behar described President Donald Trump's handshake with Russian President Vladimir Putin with a homosexual innuendo on Monday.
Behar said that Trump's position made him "a bottom" because Putin's hand was over his. That term is used to describe the submissive role among gay men, which Behar and the audience appeared to enjoy.
"See, when Putin shook hands with Trump, he did this," Behar said, holding co-host Sunny Hostin's hand to demonstrate. "This is Putin's hand on top. So Trump was a bottom. Get it?"
Howls and laughs followed her comment before some audience members broke into applause.
"What? He was on the bottom, that's all," Behar said when the applause died down.
Later in the segment, Behar also attacked Republicans for their partisan loyalty to Trump.
"Trump's base is still—80 percent of Republicans are still OK with him, and these people you're talking about, they are worried about the next election," Behar said about Republicans defending Trump. "They're all a bunch of cowards, more cowardly than they are patriotic."
This is not the first time Behar has made jokes about Trump and Putin being gay. In June she said that she would enjoy a Romeo and Juliet production with Trump and Putin as the titular star-crossed lovers.
Describing Trump's relationship with Putin in homosexual terms has become common on the left, which some gay rights defenders have criticized. When talk show host Stephen Colbert courted controversy by making a joke about oral sex between the two leaders, law professor Craig Konnoth said that it was homophobic.
"Using gay love or gay sexuality as a punchline to advance critiques of Trump's policies ultimately threatens to do more harm than good," Konnoth wrote in the Washington Post about Colbert. "These jokes take many gay individuals back to less happy times, when humor like this was a reminder of a real and ever-present threat."
The Washington Free Beacon contacted the Human Rights Campaign, a prominent LGBTQ advocacy group, about Behar's joke. The group did not respond at the time of this article's publication.