Sunny Hostin Reads Lindsey Graham’s Controversial Tweets On-Air During ‘The View’ Memorial

The cohosts of The View were, like many news and talk show programs, paying tribute to late South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at the top of Monday’s (July 13) show, and while some wanted to put politics aside for the moment during the discussion, others refused to skirt over the controversies of Graham’s tenure in Washington.

Sunny Hostin, in particular, decided to use Graham’s own words to outline his true legacy.

“I mean, I didn’t know him well. He had been on this show several times. I remember speaking to Meghan McCain about him quite a bit because she was very close to him and was very disappointed in the change that she saw after John McCain died. But I think he was certainly this political chameleon, and his legacy is complicated, and people are speaking out about the very hypocrisy that you saw when he was John McCain’s friend, and when he became friends with Donald Trump. Steve Schmidt, who’s a political strategist who worked on the John McCain campaign in 2008, wrote just today, ‘Lindsey knew better,’ and he said, ‘He was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.’ That is someone that knew him. He also called him ‘a pilot fish, a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus, and that-that’s Lindsey,'” Hostin said to start out her thoughts.

She continued, “And if you look at his own words, Lindsey’s own words, in 2015, he calls Trump ‘a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.’ In 2016 he said, ‘If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it.’ But then, in January 2026, he calls him ‘the greatest president of all time,’ and then May 27, 2026, he says, ‘They should change the Nobel Prize to the Trump Prize,’ and then finally on June 9, 2026, he says, ‘Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.’… When you’re talking about a complicated legacy and someone who may have betrayed his country for power, that seems to be, in my view, what his legacy became.”

Thank you, Sunny for keeping it 💯about Lindsey Graham’s complex legacy. #TheView pic.twitter.com/lF78w83w8f

— Chanteezy! ♉️💛 (@iamchanteezy) July 13, 2026

Ana Navarro, who actually spoke first on the issue, also had a complicated take on the matter but ultimately concluded that no one should celebrate Graham’s death.

“Well, I knew him very well. He was a friend of mine for many years. Frankly, through John McCain, who was his best friend and his mentor for many years. First thing I want to say is I saw a lot of posts online this week, kind of celebrating his death and rejoicing. And listen, I know that Trump does that. He did it with Bob Mueller, he did it with John McCain, he did it with Rob Reiner. But it’s inhumane and it’s really lacking empathy,” she said.

“And the dead person’s dead and can’t hear you and can’t read your post. But his family, his sister, who he adopted when she was 13 because both their parents died, is alive and is hearing, and so I think that for the benefit, for humanity, for having, you know, a normal decency towards the family of the dead, that just has to stop. The fact that Donald Trump isn’t decent doesn’t mean the rest of us have to do it,” she said. Navarro went on to call Graham a fun person, noted that politics was his life, and praised him for voting to confirm Barack Obama‘s first Supreme Court nominee when others, including McCain, did not.

Alyssa Farah Griffin sent condolences to Graham’s staffers, whom she knew, and said she hopes that Congress will pass the Russian sanctions bill Graham had been working on before his death.

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Sara Haines, meanwhile, agreed with Navarro that taking shots at Graham was harmful, saying, “I didn’t know really much about him, but it did disturb me that people were online saying things like, ‘Don’t humanize him.’ You don’t have to humanize a human. He was a human, and so there were people that loved him. There were people that cared for him, and whether I disagreed with him completely or not, he’s gone. And so my heart goes out to the people around him that are suffering.”

Whoopi Goldberg closed out the segment to say, “All these things that have been said are true. He was a complicated cat, and there’s no getting around that. And some things I wish he really had paid more attention to. Like I love that he was all about the Ukraine, but I wish he had stopped this one [Trump] from trying to put together Project 2025.” She then added, “None of us is perfect. …We make weird choices, and they’re not always the choices people want us to make the way they want us to make them. And he lived with himself, and him and God will figure out whatever went on, but at this point in time, he’s gone. God rest his soul. God rest your soul. I don’t wish any bad on anybody, even the ones you know I really should. But I don’t.”

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM PASSES SUDDENLY AT 71: As the death of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham sends shock waves through Washington, D.C., and tributes pour in from both sides of the aisle, ‘The View’ co-hosts react. pic.twitter.com/0ZwhjlELgb

— The View (@TheView) July 13, 2026

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