Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) may have thought she was going on The View to promote her new book The Mind of a Conservative Woman: Seeking the Best for Family and Country. Instead, she spent her entire appearance struggling to defend President Donald Trump.
Blackburn began the interview by fawning over the “fantastic job” Vice President Mike Pence did in his debate against her Senate colleague Kamala Harris the night before. But she had a harder time defending Trump’s decision to bail on what the Commission on Presidential Debates decided on Thursday would be a virtual second debate with Joe Biden next week.
“I would love to see the president debate again because he has a great record of accomplishment to defend,” Blackburn said. When co-host Sara Haines asked if that meant she would rather see Trump debate Biden than hold another in-person rally that night, as his campaign indicated the COVID-stricken president would do instead, she said, “I know the president loves doing rallies. Let’s do both!”
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Then Blackburn tried to pivot into attacking the debt that President Obama and Vice President Biden left Trump, but Joy Behar wasn’t having it. “The economy is now in the toilet,” she said. “People are out of work. Children are not eating, madam. How can you brag about his administration? There are hungry children out there!”
But the senator’s most egregious deflections came after Sunny Hostin confronted her over the “xenophobic” tweet she posted upon President Trump’s return from the hospital this week. “President Trump has once again defeated China,” she tweeted along with footage of him exiting Walter Reed.
“I don’t think that you meant to offend all of the Asian-Americans and Asians that you did offend by that tweet,” Hostin said. “More than 211,000 American lives have been lost to this virus and counting. Trump’s own White House has become, as Joy mentioned, a hotbed of infection. What did you mean by ‘defeating’ anything? What have we defeated exactly?”
“One of the things we do know is that this virus came from China, and that is something that we recognize,” Blackburn answered, nonsensically. “This is where the virus came from.”
Things only got more uncomfortable in the next segment when Haines pointed out that Blackburn attended the likely super-spreader event at the White House Rose Garden. "Do you regret not wearing a mask in that crowd, and what do you say to Americans who were frustrated by what they saw that day?” she asked.
“I say to Americans who are frustrated by what they saw that day, remember to wear your mask,” Blackburn answered, a bit hypocritically. Adding that she “had been tested right before” the event, she explained that she took her mask off to walk into the event and “put it back on when I came back out.”
“But, you know, it’s a great reminder to us,” she said of the massive White House outbreak. “Wash your hands. Wear gloves if you need to. Make certain that you are using sanitizer.”
