Several Democrats running in 2020 for president have visited ABC’s The View for largely friendly interviews that still somehow manage to be more even-handed than what they experience on actual news programs. However on Wednesday’s show, Democrat Rep. Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii surprisingly faced tough questions from hosts Meghan McCain and Ana Navarro about her position against U.S. intervention in Syria and Venezuela.

After facing some neutral questions from co-hosts Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin, Meghan McCain stepped in to grill the Democrat for secretly visiting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017, calling her an “Assad apologist:”

“When I hear the name Tulsi Gabbard, I think of Assad apologist, I think of someone who comes back to the United States and is spouting propaganda from Syria. You have said that the Syrian president, Assad, is not the enemy of the United States, yet he's used chemical weapons against his own people 300 times,” she began.

McCain added, “When you say regime change is hurtful for the country but gassing children isn't hurtful, it's hard for me to understand where you come from as a humanitarian standpoint if you were to become President?”



Gabbard started to protest, saying, “You're putting words in my mouth.” But McCain pressed her to clarify her position.

MCCAIN: You did not say that Syrian President Assad is not the enemy of the United States? Say it now, clarify.



GABBARD: The issue here is how can we help --



MCCAIN: One moment. Is he the enemy of the United States?

Gabbard wouldn’t answer “yes” or “no” but instead affirmed that Assad was a “brutal dictator” who has used chemical weapons on his people. She went on to reaffirm her non-interventionist foreign policy positions. Next up was fill-in host Ana Navarro, who surprisingly admitted that she was with President Trump on his stance on the crisis in Venezuela. Navarro pressed Gabbard, whom she called a friend, on her similar stance on that country:

I'm very troubled by the tweets about Venezuela that you've put out. We've talked about that, what Maduro is doing to the people of Venezuela. There’s over 3 million have been displaced. People are starving. He's not allowing humanitarian aid in. He is a thug, he is a dictator, he is corrupt. And I am very supportive of what the United States is doing right now, leading the solidarity in support of freedom-loving Venezuelans and putting economic sanctions. Why are you so against intervention in Venezuela, not military intervention but what we are doing?

Gabbard again argued that there was “devastating impacts” on countries when the U.S. tried to enact regime change, before they cut to commercial.

You can see the exchange below:

While The View co-hosts almost entirely focused on her foreign policy record, host Abby Huntsman asked her if she supported the Green New Deal, (she didn’t) and Joy Behar asked her about health care policy, where Gabbard fell in line with the rest of her party for universal “free” health care for all.

But more recently, Gabbard rebuked her Democrat colleagues in an op-ed for bashing Catholic judicial nominees, and got flak from the left for doing so. Neither the networks nor The View asked her about that.

To read the full transcript, click expand: