Video plays below
If ABC executives were hoping for a calm little Friday chat about the 2028 presidential race, they clearly forgot who signs the checks at The View: outrage, applause lines, and the occasional daytime-TV nervous breakdown.
The latest eruption came after co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin floated what’s become increasingly common chatter in Republican circles — that Secretary of State Marco Rubio could be the GOP’s frontrunner in 2028 if President Trump’s political machine keeps steamrolling the opposition.
“The odds-on favorite for the Republican nominee for 2028 as of today are absolutely Marco Rubio,” Griffin said.
That was all the spark Sunny Hostin needed to launch into a full-blown televised tirade.
“Well then, the Republicans are going to lose because I do not think that Marco Rubio can remove the stench of the Trump administration from his very being!” Hostin thundered as the studio audience cheered her on like it was amateur night at a Manhattan resistance cabaret.
Then came the lecture.
Hostin blasted Rubio — the son of Cuban immigrants — for serving in the Trump administration while backing immigration enforcement policies she claimed target minorities.
“He is the son of immigrants from Cuba that came here in 1956. How dare he stand by complicitly and allow Latinos to be rounded up, allow American citizens to be shot in the face and shot in the chest and shot in the back,” Hostin said.
“How dare he allow the voting — stand by idly — while the Voting Rights Act is gutted, and disenfranchising African American voting,” she continued, before pivoting into a broader attack on Trump-era immigration policies and travel restrictions.
Hostin also brought up Haiti’s ongoing instability and slammed efforts to roll back Temporary Protected Status protections for some migrants.
“What about Haiti?” she asked. “You think a Haitian should — is allowed to be here with their temporary status just thrown away and going back to a country that is in complete political turmoil when his very parents left political turmoil and found asylum here? Disgusting!”
There was just one problem: Rubio’s parents didn’t flee Fidel Castro.
That awkward little fact-check came courtesy of fellow co-host Ana Navarro, who jumped in before history got completely steamrolled.
“Can I tell you something? They didn’t leave political turmoil,” Navarro corrected. “They left, as you mentioned, in 1956. So, they left before the Cuban Revolution. They left because they were poor. They left like so many people leave Mexico, leave some other countries, because they were looking for better — for economic opportunities.”
Hostin’s response? Not exactly a retreat.
“Even worse! Even worse then on Marco Rubio,” she shot back.
Navarro piled on by noting Rubio’s grandfather once faced a deportation order decades ago — a detail Democrats and media critics have repeatedly resurfaced as immigration debates heat up ahead of 2028.
The fiery exchange comes as Rubio’s national profile continues to rise inside Republican circles. Once dismissed as the establishment’s “Little Marco” during the brutal 2016 GOP primary, Rubio has since reinvented himself as a more combative America First conservative closely aligned with Trump on foreign policy, China, border security, and immigration enforcement.
That evolution has made him increasingly popular with Republican voters — and apparently a permanent fixture in The View’s daytime nightmare rotation.
Staunchly racist Sunny Hostin doubles down the incendiary suggestion that Rubio is a race traitor:
ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN: The odds on favorite for the Republican nominee for 2028, as of today, are absolutely Marco Rubio.
SUNNY HOSTIN: Well then the Republicans are going to lose… pic.twitter.com/3hwTTCXIBo
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) May 8, 2026
