‘The View’ Cohosts Slam Senator Who Mocked Murdered Minnesota Representative

Amanda Bell June 16, 2025, 11:56 am

Comments

For their first “Hot Topic” of the day on Monday’s (June 16) live episode of The View, the cohosts weighed in on the shocking murder of a Minnesota state representative and her husband and the attempted murder of a state senator and his wife by an apparently partisan actor who has since been detained.

The cohosts were united in their disdain for the alleged political motivations of the attacker against the victims, who were prominent Democrats in the state, and in their disgust for the reactions by certain other politicians — chiefly, Utah Senator Mike Lee, who posted photos of the alleged shooter and captioned it, “Nightmare on Waltz Street” (a perceived reference to the state’s governor, Tim Walz).

“People keep saying this is going to be a wake-up call, but when you start thinking about Paul Pelosi, you start thinking about all of the people… who have been in the midst of this, what is happening is it’s more than just being polite, it’s more than hatred. There is something happening here that is really kind of freaky that I don’t think I remember seeing,” Whoopi Goldberg said.

“If it’s a wake-up call, I feel like some folks in America keep pressing the snooze,” Ana Navarro said in response. “One of the things I’m most afraid of is that we become numb to this, the way that it feels we’ve become numb to school shootings, where it’s just expected that that happens in America. ‘Oh, that’s just living in America,’ and we can’t do that.”

She also said that elected representatives — specifically, the president — have a responsibility to stop the rhetoric that incites this kind of violence. “That also includes Donald Trump — and I’m going to say his name — because what we saw last week was a terrible escalation of political threats. We saw him talk about detaining and arresting Gavin Newsom for the crime of having been elected. We saw the speaker of the house talk about tar and feathering Gavin Newsom for the crime of being elected. And we saw federal officials make Alex Padilla, a sitting U.S. senator, the senior senator from California, kneel and then detain him and handcuff him because he wanted to ask questions.”

'The View': Whoopi Goldberg Gives Stark Warning to Speaker Mike Johnson

“There’s something happening here,” Sara Haines agreed. “It’s like a slow dehumanization of the other, whatever that other is to someone, and in this instance, it’s a political division, and I think people need to check in with themselves. When they hear someone is attacked in their house, if their first response is not feeling gutted and heartbroken without any identifiers… you’re part of the problem.”

She then turned to the tweet by the Utah senator as an example of the real problem at hand, saying, “You’ve got Mike Lee out of Utah, who is either mocking what happened here when he tweets things like, ‘This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,’ or ‘Nightmare on Waltz Street,’ this was within hours of the loss of life and the brutal attack in these people’s homes…. I don’t know what is wrong with our government that someone is not immediately removed or punished.”

Sunny Hostin pulled out some statistics about the growing acceptance rate of political violence among Americans, saying, “There is this normalization of political violence, and it’s been happening since about 2016. In 2024, Chapman University [did] a study that suggests that a possible cause for this rise in targeted violence against politicians is this declining level of confidence in our most important social institutions and the growing political divisions. And what was really disheartening to me, one in five adults believe Americans have to resort to violence to get their country back on track. A Washington Post poll found that one in three Americans say they believe violence against the government is justified. And so when that is starting to happen, it’s not only just a slide to fascism, it’s not just a slide to authoritarianism, it’s an end of democracy and how we do things.”

Alyssa Farah Griffin echoed Haines’ point to say, “We have to get to the heart of it because there is this reaction when something happens, and if your first thought is, ‘Ooh, let me make sure he wasn’t wearing my jersey, whoever the perpetrator was, I want to make sure he was on my political side,’ do you care more about that than the two children who were left behind, who lost both of their parents in Minnesota this weekend? … We have deep political polarization in this country, it’s dangerous. I never thought I would live through this level of political violence that we have.”

Goldberg then spoke up again to reiterate her furor over the “tarred and feathered” comment Navarro alluded to — which was originally spoken by Mike Johnson about Newsom — saying, “I’m not gonna pull my punches here. Last week, when that ‘tarred and feather’ [comment happened], it was like, ‘Mike Johnson, what are you doing?’ You always say, ‘Oh, we got to come down on the rhetoric. Stop doing it.’ And then you don’t. … I’m putting this in your hands. I’m putting this in the hands of the people who are supposed to be representing us. If you’re not going to represent us, then don’t run for office because this is not the way to do it.”

The View, Weekdays 11 a.m. ET, ABC