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‘The View’ Host Slams Ex-Pal’s ‘Shameful’ MAGA Makeover

Ana Navarro and her former drinking buddy are on the outs after she initially defended her.

Ana Navarro turned on her one-time friend Pam Bondi on The View on Monday, after defending Donald Trump’s selection of the former Florida Attorney General in November.

“I’ve known Pam Bondi for a long time,” Navarro told her co-hosts. “I haven’t spoken to her obviously in a few years, but this is a completely different Pam Bondi than the person I knew in Florida, who was an affable, nice person,” she said. Navarro praised Saturday Night Live’s parody of Bondi over the weekend, though she added, “These people may not need much help to look dumb.”

Amy Poehler played Bondi as belligerent and mendacious alongside Tina Fey’s parody of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Bondi tried to get in on the joke, posting to X Sunday, “@Sec_Noem⁩, should we recreate this picture in Chicago? Loving Amy Poehler!”

Bondi seems to be lapping up the attention, Navarro said, disappointed. “I think she’s loving this. I think she’s loving the fact that it’s, you know—that we are talking about her this morning—is probably raising her stock with the MAGA base, but, frankly I think what she’s doing to the institution of the DOJ and the oversight in Congress is shameful and an embarrassment,” she said.

The Daily Beast has reached out to the Depart of Justice and White House for comment.

Navarro, who has lived in Florida since 1980, revealed on the View last year that she and Bondi were drinking buddies. “I don’t want to ruin her reputation with MAGA people,” Navarro said then, “but Pam Bondi and I hung out a lot when she was Attorney General of Florida and she would come to Miami. We drank a lot together. I liked her a lot. She’s not a kook.”

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The former Republican political strategist turned never-Trumper then praised Trump’s pick when Bondi was announced as part of his Cabinet in November. “I know Pam Bondi very well,” Navarro said during an appearance on AC360. “Pam Bondi, like many other Republicans, is a mainstream Republican who turned MAGA.”

“I will tell you, she is not an ogre. She is not a jerk. She is not a person who purposely wants to come across as being the kind of person that Matt Gaetz wants to come across as being,” she said at the time, calling Bondi “one of the better picks” from the then-incoming president.

“She has been an early loyalist of Donald Trump back in the 2016 primaries. She was a loyalist of him even though Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio were running. I think with Pam Bondi, he gets loyalty, which matters a lot to him.”

Navarro did not expect that loyalty to run so deeply, apparently, as she blasted Bondi’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, which Navarro said “is going to go down in history as one of the worst performances by an attorney general in front of Congress.”

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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