A former White House staffer clashed with a host of The View in tense scenes on CNN fueled by Donald Trump’s drug boat strikes in Venezuela.
NewsNight host Abby Phillip was forced to interject after Harrison Fields, who was Trump’s White House principal deputy press secretary until August, locked horns with fellow panelist Ana Navarro, who is also on The View.
At one point during their fiery exchange, Nicaraguan-born Navarro accused Fields of “gaslighting” her as they sparred over the U.S. Navy’s strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela.
The Trump administration is mired in controversy over a reported second “kill them all” strike on an alleged Venezuelan “narco-terrorist” boat in the Caribbean on Sept. 2, killing two people who survived the initial strike.
Fields, who now works at the all-Republican lobbying firm CGCN Group, insisted that the Navy was “protecting American interests.”
“What is the American interest?” Navarro hit back. “Oil?”
“Drugs pouring into this country and killing us,” Fields retorted.
That started an intense debate between the pair over the actual source of fentanyl coming into America, with Navarro suggesting it was more likely to come from Mexico than Venezuela.
“Why aren’t you bombing Mexico?” she asked Fields.
“That’s a ridiculous argument,” Fields snapped. He then said at Navarro, “The president you advocated for for four years, Joseph R. Biden, allowed our border to be open… ”
“You’re gaslighting me,” Navarro said to Fields, cutting him off.
They continued to argue, with Navarro claiming “no fentanyl comes from Venezuela,” and Fields stating “tell that to the fentanyl families who have died.”
Navarro pointed at Fields and said, “You are wrong, and you are lying to the American people.”
“Well, your day job is The View,” Fields said to Navarro, who instantly clapped back to him, “and you have no day job.”
Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic Party, who was also on Wednesday’s panel, posted from the set, stating on X, “I’m sitting at the table right now and still feel the heat from that clapback!”
Host Abby Phillip interrupted the feuding pair to take Fields to task over what she called his Republican “talking points.”
Telling Fields to his face that he was “wrong” and had “mixed up a whole bunch of stuff” in his argument defending the bombing of boats in the Caribbean, she asked him directly where fentanyl comes from.
Fields kept blaming the Democrats for allowing fentanyl to come into America, without directly answering the question, only saying, “It comes from many places.”
“There are factual issues with your assertion that the fentanyl crisis is being caused by Venezuela,” Phillip told Fields, “when we know for a fact that that is not the case.”
Fields claimed the Trump administration had been “transparent” before Phillip cut him off to ask, “I’m just curious about whether you’re willing to acknowledge facts or not, or if you’re just more committed to your talking points?”
When the former Trump official was on NewsNight in October, he took the Republican Party line of blaming the Democrats for the government shutdown.
“You have a lot of Americans that are going to be without food stamps because of the Democrats,” he said, justifying the Trump administration’s cuts to welfare earlier in the year as “cleaning up the program of waste, fraud and abuse.”
Fields had previously teased his Wednesday appearance on NewsNight on his social media, saying he was “back for more.”
While he has yet to post about the exchange, his feed was a mix of comments saying he looked uncomfortable and was outplayed, and others claiming he stood his ground and did an excellent job.
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