The View’s Sunny Hostin Takes Swipe at Morning Joe Co-Hosts for ‘Kissing the Ring’ After Their Meeting With Trump — Watch

Nick Caruso
·2-min read

On Monday’s episode of The View, Sunny Hostin expressed her strong take about the press “kissing the ring” of President-elect Donald Trump. The topic came up after Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski announced they had met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago Friday in an attempt to restart communication with him.

“The bottom line is that America needs a free press that is willing to speak truth to power right now more than ever,” said Hostin. (Watch her statement in the video embedded above.) “I think that we have to be very clear-eyed when we think about the president-elect and cover the president-elect, and I don’t think you need to sit down for 90 minutes at Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring to be able to speak truth and be able to cover a story.

More from TVLine

“So maybe they’re not journalists in the true sense. Maybe they’re saying that they’re opinion journalists, but we have to remember that Trump is the guy who ushered in the era of fake news,” she continued. “He’s the guy who ushered in alternative facts. He is the guy who attacked three black female journalists. He’s the guy who revoked Jim Acosta’s press credentials for asking him a question… I don’t think he can be trusted in the way that other presidents could be trusted. This is an aberration.”

While co-hosts Sara Haines and Alyssa Farah Griffin praised Morning Joe for attempting to reopen a line of communication, Ana Navarro sided with Hostin and shared her own opinion on the situation.

“I will never sit down with him and I don’t think I’m gonna have to make that decision because I don’t think I’m ever going to get invited,” she said. “The truth of the matter is, as we know around this table, that it is hard to criticize and denounce the abuses of power by Donald Trump when he is president. We have been there before. It means threats, it means death threats, it means retribution against your family, it means crazy things showing up at your house, it means lawsuits, it means all sorts of things. We’ve done it before and if we have to do it again, we will do so again.

“I think there’s a lot of people who are probably looking at what Joe and Mika did and find it opportunistic,” she said. “There are people who change their stripes or maybe their spots depending on who’s in power and what benefits them… Everybody has to live with their decisions. Everybody has to look in the mirror. I’m good.”

Best of TVLine

Sign up for TVLine's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Latest stories