Vice President JD Vance walked into The View expecting a political firing squad — but he says one of the show’s most outspoken liberal hosts ended up surprising him during a commercial break.

Vance appeared on the ABC daytime show Tuesday while promoting his new spiritual memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. Later that night, he told Gutfeld! that the experience was not quite the ambush he had braced for.

“I expected them to be absolutely vicious, and they were only a little bit vicious,” Vance said. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.”

Then came the off-camera moment that apparently left him stunned.

According to Vance, longtime View co-host Joy Behar gave him a backhanded compliment during a break in the show.

“Joy Behar even said during the break, not joking, she said, ‘You know what? You’re, like, pretty good for a Republican,’” Vance said. “And I was like, ‘Whoa.’ That is a way better compliment than I expected from Joy Behar.”

The vice president’s sit-down with the famously liberal panel was not exactly warm and fuzzy, though.

Vance joked that he expected co-host Sunny Hostin to go after him the hardest, but said it was Whoopi Goldberg who ended up surprising him.

“I thought that Sunny, the woman to my left, was going to call me a racist,” Vance said. “In reality, it was Whoopi, the woman to my right, who called me a racist. So expectations were defied.”

The remark appeared to refer to a heated exchange between Vance and Goldberg over claims that the Trump administration had watered down or removed Black history exhibits at museums. Vance pushed back on the allegation during the tense discussion.

The conversation also turned fiery when the co-hosts pressed him on immigration and President Donald Trump’s recent comments about inflation.

Still, Vance said he went into the appearance hoping for a real discussion, despite knowing he was walking into hostile territory.

Before the interview, he told Fox News Digital that he believed it was still worth trying to talk with people who strongly disagree with him.

“It may be the optimist in me, but I just fundamentally think that most people — not everybody, but most people — even if I disagree with them, you ought to try to have a conversation with them,” Vance said.

“We’re going to go and try to have a good conversation. I hope they meet me halfway. I’m a little skeptical, but we’ll see,” he added.

By the end of the day, Vance seemed to believe the appearance went better than expected — even if The View still delivered plenty of fireworks.