Abby Huntsman Tried to Defend Donald Trump on The View by Bringing Up Hitler

ABC’s The View is back, baby! And while Meghan McCain is no longer there to grace us with inane rants about socialism or being bullied by the big bad media, there’s a new conservative nepotism case sitting at that big glass table, and folks? She’s doing just great so far.

Former Fox News commentator Abby Huntsman, daughter of failed Republican presidential candidate and current U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, offered a bizarre semi-defense of Donald Trump on Thursday after the president’s grotesque assertion that Puerto Rico’s death toll following last year’s Hurricane Maria had been artificially inflated by Democrats to make him look bad.

“I don’t think president Trump is solely to blame for what happened,” Huntsman insisted. “Puerto Rico had a number of their own problems before Maria even hit. They were filing for bankruptcy, they had a power grid that was in chaos.”

Thankfully, co-host Sunny Hostin was having none of it. After quickly pointing out that Puerto Rico has been suffering from unfair U.S. trade laws for decades, she pointed out that FEMA had, in fact, admitted to some of its own failures following the hurricane. What’s more, Hostin continued, following Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010, President Obama quickly mobilized a massive American response within days. “And Haiti isn’t even a United States territory,” she noted. So what was stopping Trump?

“I don’t think that’s fair, and I don’t think that’s fair—like yesterday—to compare [president Trump] to a dictator,” Huntsman countered.

She continued:

That’s comparing him to a Hitler, someone that gassed their own people, that starved their own people, someone that orders [sic] for thousands of their own people to die. Do you think President Trump was in the Oval Office saying ‘How can we make it worse for Puerto Ricans? How can we make it so more people die?’

Here’s a good rule of thumb: If your defense of someone hinges on “Well, look, at least they’re not Adolf Hitler,” it might be time to re-evaluate a few things in your life.

“When you see someone, the president, letting his own citizens die and then turning it around and saying that they didn’t really die, I think that that’s very similar to the acts of a dictator,” Hostin replied.

“It’s an easy applause line,” Huntsman conceded. “And I think it’s an extreme way to look at it.”

Another way to look at it is that maybe people whose dads are employed by very bad men should think twice before invoking Hitler on national television. Just a thought.