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Looking at the cool, calm and glamorous Padma Lakshmi, 45, host of the famous Top Chef program on television, it would be hard to imagine she could lose her equanimity at any time under any circumstances. But she came close to it she admits during the October 16 exchange on the feisty and argumentative show The View, which featured conservative author Ann Coulter there to sell her new book “Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Hell Hole.”
Watching Lakshmi sitting beside Coulter as the provocative commentator spewed vitriol against immigrants, it appears the Top Chef host was unshaken. But in a Dec. 3 interview with Andy Cohen on “Watch What Happens Live, a Bravo TV show, with fellow guest Adriana Lima, Lakshmi revealed she restrained her urge to ‘b**ch’ slap Coulter.
“I was thinking, ‘Lord, please don’t let me slap a bitch on national TV.’ It was my first time on The View and Ann Coulter is a very bright woman, she’s whip smart, she has a right to her own opinion,” Lakshmi said on the Dec. 3 show, adding, “And I’m on The View, I respect her (Coulter) right to express her point of view. But, you know, I don’t agree with a lot of her views and I don’t agree with them for some very vehement reasons. Especially on immigration. I just thought, ‘I have to be graceful because I have a limit. She may not have that limit.’ I didn’t even need to talk. You can see it on my face.”
But Lakshmi’s face showed no sign of the inner distress she was feeling as Coulter expounded on her opinion to stop immigrants from coming to this country. “The nation that has been so welcoming to immigrants to women, to children, it’s been an amazingly successful nation. And the Democrats do it (allow immigrants) to get the votes. The rich do it to get cheap labor and the cheap maids. And they strut around like Martin Luther King,” Coulter said when asked what she was trying to prove in her book and why she supports presidential candidate Donald Trump who has spoken about mass expulsion of illegal immigrants.
Coulter went on to say the immigration policy was hurting Americans. “Our social programs are for the American poor. Our jobs are for American workers,” she said. She differentiated her lineage from those of others at the table saying, “I’m descended from settlers. I’m living in America which was created by settlers and not immigrants.”
Twice Lakshmi intervened, once to point out that her own mother came to this country because there was a shortage of medical professionals and once to ask if Coulter was against all immigration or just illegal immigration or only for rich immigrants coming in. Coulter acknowledged that professionals were acceptable as immigrants, but that was “unusual” and that “a majority of immigrants are on welfare.”
“We don’t need to be importing other people’s poor,” Coulter asserted, adding that currently there were 40 million foreign born Americans “and we need to assimilate that.”
Lakshmi, a fashion icon in New York City, was born in Chennai and came to the U.S. when she was a toddler with her divorced mother Vijaya Lakshmi. She was brought up in New York and Los Angeles and was among the first Indian women to be sought as a model by fashion houses like Armani, Versace, and Ralph Lauren. She went on to become a food writer and is the executive producer of Top Chef since 2006.
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