“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin called out Democratic lawmakers who attended President Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night for not walking out on the president after Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, was removed for being disruptive.
“What I saw when Rep. Al Green stood up and said, you don’t have a mandate to take away Medicaid, and he was tossed out, I expected the rest of his Democratic caucus, the rest of his colleagues, to walk out with him,” she said on Wednesday.
“Because alone you can survive, but together you thrive. That is the energy that we need. They should have stood with him in solidarity. And we had Karine Jean-Pierre here on this show yesterday, and she said we have to have a sense of urgency as we move forward, and we cannot do it the way we have in the past. This is not normal. It is a five-alarm fire,” Hostin continued.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had Green removed from the House chamber on Tuesday after the Democratic congressman raised his cane and yelled at the president during the speech.
Hostin urged the Democrats to stop playing by the rules.
“You can’t play by the rules with a party that has thrown away the rule book. You cannot do it,” she concluded.
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin praised Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., for her rebuttal to Trump’s speech, but suggested the Democratic protests on the House floor fell short.
“I thought that Elissa Slotkin was masterful, and I think she gave Democrats the winning message that they flailed to have [sic]. But I thought the antics on the floor were not helpful. I don’t think that waving a cane is the optics that the Democrats want in this,” she said.
She also said that the Democratic lawmakers holding up paddles and signs were ineffective.
Griffin asked, “Who was advising these people?”
Some Squad Democrats wrote live responses to Trump’s speech on a white board. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., scribbled several messages on a mini-whiteboard, including, “No king!,” “What about the immigrants that worked for you?,” and “That’s a lie!”
The protests from Democrats were mocked by liberals in the media, including late-night host Stephen Colbert, who jokingly held up his own paddle during his show that read, “try doing something.”