The View co-host Sunny Hostin has questioned Donald Trump’s motives behind ordering the U.S. military to seize a tank in Venezuela.
After Trump escalated tensions with Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, with the controversial move Wednesday, the panelists on ABC’s popular daytime talk show suggested that the president is preparing for a war with Venezuela to distract from his own White House scandals.
Hostin, 57, joined her co-hosts in debating the legality of the seizure before she slammed Trump for acting this aggressively in international waters.
“The piece that I don’t understand is that the President of the United States is almost acting as if he’s a pirate and the United States is just a group of pirates,” Hostin said during Thursday’s episode
She doubled down while acknowledging that a federal judge previously signed a warrant allowing the seizure: “Who are we to board a ship even with a U.S. federal judge's seizure warrant and then keep the oil?
“That to me feels a lot like corruption. It feels a lot like, to me, imperialism. It feels a lot like me to fascism,” Hostin slammed. “And while it may be cloaked in an appearance of legality, I still question that.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin chimed in to say that the decision might have been legal, but that it was undiplomatic of the president.
“We do sanction terrorist organizations and regimes that are associated with them all over the world and we do seize assets that could support terrorist activities,” the former aide to Trump explained to her co-hosts. “This is long-standing throughout the Middle East. It's new because it's in the western hemisphere.”
Whoopi Goldberg then said that Trump has “a lot of nerve” stoking tensions overseas while she says America is being “run into the ground.”
Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi insisted that the seizure was to “prevent the transport of sanctioned oil,” though Venezuela accused the U.S. of an “international act of piracy.”
“Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed,” the Venezuelan government said in a statement. “It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”
Trump bragged about the interception while speaking with reporters Wednesday, saying: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela. Largest one ever seized actually. And other things are happening.”
The president refused to say more, only that the tank was seized “for a very good reason.”
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