Tempers flared Thursday on ABC’s “The View,” when the topic turned to President Donald Trump‘s recent claim via Twitter that Democrats are pushing a conspiracy to damage him when they say 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria.

“This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico,” the president tweeted. (See his tweet a little lower down.)

“If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!” he also said.

Co-host Sunny Hostin (above, second from right) called Trump’s comments “grotesque.”

She claimed they rendered him “illegitimate as the president of the United States,” as Mediaite also reported.

New co-host Abby Huntsman (above, second from left), however, seemed to attribute Trump’s remarks to his habit of exaggeration — and lamented how politicized Puerto Rico’s recovery has now become.

“I don’t think President Trump is solely to blame for what happened,” Huntsman said.

“Puerto Rico had a number of problems before Maria even hit,” she added, and she went on to name that U.S. territory’s “bankruptcy and a power grid that was in chaos.”

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Hostin disagreed — saying Puerto Rico’s pre-Maria conditions were created by U.S. policy, which treated the island “as a bank account.”

Huntsman immediately took on Hostin’s comments, accusing her fellow co-host of being “unfair” when she compared the president to a dictator on-air the previous day.

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“That’s comparing him to a Hitler,” Huntsman argued. “Someone that gasses their own people, that starves their people, that orders thousands of their own people to die. You think President Trump was in the Oval Office saying, ‘How can we make it worse for Puerto Ricans?’ You think that’s what happened in the White House?”

Hostin said she wouldn’t have compared Trump to Hitler — but she stuck to her view that Trump doesn’t care about Puerto Rico, noted Mediaite.

“At the time that this was happening, he was more concerned with NFL athletes protesting and kneeling than he was concerned about what’s going on in the United States,” Hostin maintained. “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.”

Goldberg said of Trump’s social media habits, “Stop tweeting, man. You’re not helping.”

As the blame game argument continued among the panel — Joy Behar (above, far right) listened intently to both Hostin and Huntsman and at times directed the conversational traffic with hand gestures — co-host Whoopi Goldberg (far left) eventually brought the conversation full circle.

She said of Trump’s social media habits, “Stop tweeting, man. You’re not helping.”

See the fireworks among the panel in the video below.