The View‘s cohosts were just as shocked as anyone about what happened on Saturday (April 25) night during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. After shots rang out near the Hilton ballroom and Secret Service agents swept in to remove Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and other executive members in attendance, other agents disarmed and apprehended the suspect. Since then, eye-witness accounts of the events have been flooding in, including one from The View‘s own executive producer Brian Teta, who was present and said it was “scary.”
Ana Navarro was particularly unnerved by the incident … and the aftermath, for which she criticized Trump directly.
First, she revealed that what shook her the most was hearing how scared CNN’s Wolf Blitzer reportedly was. “Wolf is a mentor, a close friend, and one of the most unflappable men on TV. Wolf is a guy who covers wars. I’ve seen him in tunnels with bombs crawling, his family survived and fled the Holocaust. And to hear Wolf talk about how scary this was, to hear Wolf say that he was three or four feet away from the shooter who got tackled down, that really hit me,” she said.
She also reacted to those percolating theories that the shooting was “staged” somehow, saying, “I don’t think that. Let me just be clear. I don’t think that. But where are we in America? When Reagan was shot in 1981, nobody would have thought about that. And so I think people have to take stock of just the level of influence that misinformation, that the lies have had on the American psyche, that the first conclusion so many people reach because of the polarization and because of some of the things that our elected officials have done.”
It was then that she offered a rebuke of Trump’s press conference words after the shooting, in which he insisted this incident was why he needed the White House East Wing ballroom that he has been pushing for.
“Frankly, it’s crazy to me that one of the first things Trump did after this was… go push for a ballroom and use this, instead of calling to a better angel and calling for unity, use it to call for the building of his ballroom. I just think school children have as much a right to have safe schools as politicians,” she continued.
Navarro also suggested that since politicians themselves experienced what many school shooting victims have, hiding under tables and fearing for their lives, perhaps it will finally inspire Congressional or administrative action on gun violence.
Later on in the discussion, Navarro offered another rebuke of Trump. After pointing out that some commenters have been blaming “the left” for the shooting, she said, “If we’re going to be honest about this, the heated political rhetoric is going on on both sides. Look, just last week after Trump was attacking the Pope, the Pope’s brother, who lives in Chicago, who lives in Illinois, had a bomb threat at his house. So this is a moment for people to take stock on what we can do and on what the people we support and like can do, not just the people that we don’t like and support are doing, and we shouldn’t be getting into a contest of who’s better or who’s worse. But the one thing that we can’t argue about is that the guy with the biggest bully pulpit is Donald Trump, and I beg of him, after three close calls, to take time to reflect and give us an example, lead by example.”
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