MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough went off on an unhinged rant Wednesday morning, calling President Trump a “would-be dictator” who would arrest reporters and even Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos if he could.
Scarborough, with wife and co-host Mika Brzenski nodding in agreement by his side, blamed Republicans for not reining in Trump as he bemoaned the events of Tuesday–apparently referring to the Justice Department intervening in the Roger Stone sentencing proposal that prompted four swamp-dwelling Mueller prosecutors to quit the case after Trump attacked the sentence as excessive. Trump and the DOJ have both said there was no communication between them about the Stone sentence with the DOJ stating it was already moving to intervene in the sentence proposal before Trump spoke out on it.
"Would Donald Trump not do whatever he could do if he could get away with it? Seriously. If he could arrest every journalist he didn't like, if he could arrest us tomorrow…If you say he wouldn't, you're just lying to yourself." —@JoeNBC pic.twitter.com/AbVLnlJyl3
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) February 12, 2020
Scarborough: …It’s not like we just started saying this, that Donald Trump has to be shown there are boundaries. We said this to Paul Ryan in the summer of 2016 when he endorsed Donald Trump and got nothing in return for it. Republicans from that point forward have never held him accountable and that’s why we, our constitutional republic, literally, and the institutions in it, literally, are being challenged every single day by this would-be dictator. Uh, let me say, that sounds tough, doesn’t it? You tell me.
Brzezinski: That’s the word I was gonna use.
Scarborough: You tell me, would Donald Trump not do whatever he could do if he could get away with it? Seriously. If he could arrest every journalist he didn’t like, if he could arrest us tomorrow? Let me ask you a question: do you think he would arrest us tomorrow? Do you think he would arrest the editor, uh, of the New York Times? The editor of the Washington Post? Jeff Bezos? Do you think he’d arrest them tomorrow and throw ’em in jail to silence ’em?
Brzezinski: It sounds like it.
Scarborough: Do you think, cu, cuz if you say he wouldn’t you’re just lying to yourself. He will get away with whatever he can get away with. And he did this yesterday, something extraordinary that hasn’t been done in our lifetime. He did it because you Republican senators gave him a blank check.
UPDATE: Longer video posted to YouTube by MSNBC in which Scarborough maligns Attorney General William Barr, repeatedly calling him “Roy Cohn”:
