Abby Huntsman really did not want to go there.
The former Fox News Host is this week’s guest co-host on The View, where on Tuesday, she tried to focus on her ex-co-worker Pete Hegseth’s more redeeming qualities as the other hosts ripped him to shreds.
Hegseth and Huntsman both hosted Fox & Friends Weekend from 2017 to 2018. “I worked on a show with Pete and praised him for his service, and he’s a smart guy and was a perfect Fox News host,” Huntsman, 39, said as the hosts discussed Trump’s pointing the finger at the defense secretary as the one who pushed the country into war.
“Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up, and you said let’s do it because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said in the clip played by the show, as he was speaking at a Memphis Safe Task Force roundtable in Tennessee.
“So the plan seems to be, blaming Hegseth,” Whoopi Goldberg commented. Huntsman jumped in, “This is so classic Trump. He doesn’t like to take accountability for anything... He’s thinking, if the oil prices don’t go down, it looks bad in the midterms… Pete looks at this as praise. He’s toast. If this doesn’t go well, this is not good for Pete Hegseth.”
As Sunny Hostin told Huntsman, “You know Pete.”
When Huntsman described Hegseth as the “perfect” Fox News host, Hostin asked, “Is he a ‘perfect’ Secretary of Defense?”
Huntsman tried desperately to avoid answering the question: “For one, I would say the cartoons and movie memes have got to stop. When you come from a military family, this is not a game.”
Hostin pressed again, “Do you think he’s qualified to be the Secretary of Defense?” and smirked at her as Huntsman, again, declined to answer directly.
“I don’t hope for the demise of the country, so I pray for the best,” Huntsman said. “I am very concerned because of the way they are playing this game.”
Still, Hostin, a former trial attorney, posed the question yet again, “Do you think he’s qualified to be the Secretary of Defense?”
Huntsman would only say, “I’m very concerned.”
Joy Behar, anticipating that her deflection was not going to get Huntsman out of answering Hostin’s question, offered, “Do you want me to save you from Sunny?” to laughs from the audience.
Huntsman offered the last-ditch effort not to give her take on Hegseth’s performance: “This is what I’ll say about cabinets—presidents usually pick people in these roles that are experts at what they do.”
Sara Haines offered, “A real expert is probably Trump’s enemy,” prompting Hostin to ask her instead of Huntsman, “So you’re saying, Pete Hegseth is probably not…” before Haines cut her off to answer, “I’ll go ahead and say Pete Hegseth is not qualified to run the Department of Defense.”
The response earned Haines applause from the studio audience, during which Huntsman shared more thoughts: “But I’ll say this, seriously, I don’t want what’s going on to fail because I have people that I love that are serving this country, and there are a lot of families that do, so this is not—I hope they, I pray they get this right.”
Much later in the segment, Huntsman finally answered the question. “I’m not here defending... By the way, I don’t think Pete’s qualified for the job. That’s not what I’m saying at all... what I’m saying is I love this country, and I don’t want it to fail.”
“Thank you,” Hostin replied.
Huntsman was a permanent host on The View from 2018 to 2020, and is the latest conservative guest co-host to occupy Alyssa Farah Griffin’s chair until she returns from her maternity leave.
In 2021, she slammed the show as “toxic” and complained the series was “all about money and the tabloids,” before returning this week.
