If you were expecting from the headline that “Morning Joe” Scarborough said something unqualifiedly positive about the president, I apologize for misleading you. Although Scarborough, who has become the poster child for Trump Derangement Syndrome, did cut Donald Trump some slack on Tuesday, he was quick to poison his benediction soon after by savaging Trump for refusing to toe the line with Russia.
Here’s the video, which opens with a not-terribly subtle swipe at the president by Scarborough’s sidekick, Mike Brezinski, who addresses Trump’s “fear of people thinking his crowd size isn’t big enough.” (If that what the young people are calling it these days.
A transcript of Scarborough’s comments follows the video:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
We don’t think the Russians had anything to do with Donald trump winning the election. I think Hillary Clinton not going to Wisconsin and not listening to Bill Clinton, and not listening to Joe Biden, and not listening to a lot of other people who were telling her back in August. And Robby Mook deciding he’s not going to poll but instead he’s going to look at analytics. There are a thousand reasons why Hillary Clinton lost starting with Hillary Clinton being a terrible candidate.
While Scarborough makes a point of saying that he’s not equipped to speak to the president’s “state of mind,” the mere mention of Trump’s mental state reveals that we are witnessing the same old Scarborough. So do the comments that follow the video in which the host and the rest of the panel take turns dumping on Trump for refusing to endorse new sanctions on Russia.
One interesting side note: One of the panelists on the “Morning Joe” segment was Noah Rothman, of Mediaite, who served as the token conservative. Maybe Rothman was just being polite or perhaps it slipped his mind that he penned a column about MSNBC’s reaction to Mitt Romney’a warning in the 2012 debates that Russia was rapidly positioning itself as America’s “number one geopolitical foe.”
Rothman writes that everyone at the network took turns cackling over both Romney’s naïveté and Barack Obama clever-as-hell putdown: “The ’80s called, they want their foreign policy back.”
Late in his summary, Rothman notes:
[T]he worst offender was one who should have, and likely did, know better, former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The former Army general greatly entertained his MSNBC hosts with some of the most snide commentary about Romney’s observation.
And which host chuckled loudest at Powell’s assessment? Why is was Joe Scarborough, of course.
Cross-posted at Constitution.com
