“The View” host Ana Navarro passionately defended Sen. Alex Padilla on Monday morning, pushing back hard against claims that he disrupted Kristi Noem’s press briefing for attention.
To kick off the days Hot Topics, the ABC hosts fumed at the recent treatment of Democratic elected officials, ranging from Padilla’s detainment to the murder and attempted murder of two Minnesota representatives. Touching on Padilla’s circumstances specifically, Navarro noted that she knows the man personally, and she would be hard pressed to believe he attended the event for any attention-seeking reasons.
“He is the least performative elected official I know,” she said. “He is serious, he is deliberate, he feels authentically, he is soft-spoken. He wasn’t there to create a media moment, he was there representing his constituents, and the Latinos and people in his community that are being dragged through the streets.”
“The babies that are being taken away from mothers, the U.S. citizen children that are being left alone in their homes,” she continued. “That’s who he was there representing, because he comes from those people, and it is upon him to do his job.”
Indeed, on Thursday, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that “Padilla didn’t want answers; he wanted attention,” while Noem herself told Fox News that “Perhaps he wanted the scene.”
Immediately following the event, the Department of Homeland Security’s official X page claimed that Padilla did not identify himself, so the Secret Service “thought he was an attacker.”
This claim was posted alongside video of Padilla, in which he audibly does identify himself in the first two seconds of the footage.
“The View” airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC.
