Ana Navarro Not-So-Subtly Rips Alyssa Farah Griffin: Trump Staffers Like You 'Emboldened a Racist'

One month into The View's 26th season, there continues to be no love lost between Ana Navarro and Alyssa Farah Griffin.

On Monday, Navarro not-so-subtly shaded Griffin by calling out Trump staffers who "emboldened a racist" by turning a blind eye to the former president's long history of insensitive remarks.

The tense segment opened with a moment of unity, as all five co-hosts agreed that Trump's Truth Social post about Elaine Chao, the wife of Sen. Mitch McConnell, was unambiguously racist. "It's not as if he's come undone," said Sunny Hostin. "This is just who he is. And it's just — we're seeing it in all its glory."

"Obviously, what he's trying to do here is say that those of us who are Americans born somewhere else are not as American," Navarro said of Trump's remark about Chao, who was born in Taiwan, before "reminding" Trump that he's been married to women born in Slovenia and Czechoslovakia. She proceeded to run through Trump's racist history, including the 1973 fine he received for discriminating against people of color and his demand that the group known as the Central Park Five (now the Exonerated Five) be sentenced to death for a crime they did not commit, among many others.

"This is on brand for Donald Trump. He was a racist before being president; he was a racist as president; and he's going to be a racist until the day he dies!" continued Navarro. "And all of those people who enabled it, all those people who defended it because they wanted to be near power, they own this, too, because they voted, they supported, they worked for, they enabled, they fortified, they emboldened a racist!"

Navarro never mentioned her co-host by name, but Griffin clearly heard the message, loud and clear.

"If I could jump in on that," she said. "This is just blatantly racist, and there's a track record of him having said things when he was in office, well-documented even before he was in office. So, hands down unequivocal. And the easiest thing should be for Republicans like Rick Scott to just say that."

"Listen, I'm guilty as somebody who hoped to see the best in him, hoped he had a vision and he wasn't as bad as the worst of what we saw," said Griffin. "But I'm here to tell you guys at home: he is worse than what you see. He is worse than what he tweets out or Truths out on social media. This is not what our country deserves."

TRUMP SLAMMED FOR ATTACKS ON McCONNELL, CHAO: In a post, he wrote that the Senate GOP leader must have a “death wish” after supporting a resolution to fund the federal government and made racist comments about McConnell’s wife – #TheView co-hosts react. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/F4QopkArl2

— The View (@TheView) October 3, 2022

But Hostin wasn't prepared to let Griffin off the hook quite yet. "I do question you in the sense that when he came down that gold escalator and said that 'Mexicans were rapists and criminals,' did that ever give you pause?" she asked. "When you looked at his history ... did it give you pause as a woman who considers herself a brown woman, 'My god, I'm working for a racist?'"

"To be honest, yes. I didn't vote for him in 2016," replied Griffin, citing Trump's criticism of Gold Star father Khizr Khan as something that "stood out" from his other racist remarks. "I'm an Arab-American, and just that he tried to 'otherize' him and he tried to demean his service."

Still, Griffin doesn't believe "we can give up on the American presidency and who the Commander-in-Chief is for four years," or else it would mean "let[ting] the crazies run the show."

"Now, I realize I could spend the rest of my life debating if that was the right choice, and honestly I spend a lot of time thinking about it," she concluded. "But what I worry about is this man could be president again. And who are the people who are going to go in, what extremists are going to staff his next presidency?"

Elsewhere on The View... Whoopi Goldberg slammed a film critic who wrote that she wears a "distracting fat suit" in her new film, Till.

"I'm just gonna say this. I don't really care how you felt about the movie, but you should know that was not a fat suit. That was me. Uh, yeah. And that was steroids — remember last year?" she said, noting that she was hospitalized last year for sciatica complications. "I assume you don't watch the show, or you would've known that was not a fat suit."

Sorry but I wouldn’t recover if this happened to me pic.twitter.com/zvR3c1Y5nT

— 𝐒𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐲 𝐇𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧 ☭ (@HostinsHens) October 3, 2022

"It's okay not to be a fan of a movie," she added. "But you want to leave people's looks out. So just comment on the acting, and if you have a question ask somebody. Because I'm sure you didn't mean to be demeaning."

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.