I’m old enough to remember when Joe Scarborough spent most of his show kissing Donald Trump’s ass. Those were the days. Cast your mind back to 2015. Mika and Joe were still just “co-workers” and they would constantly yuck it up with then candidate Donald J. Trump. Don’t take my word for it — even the Washington Post wrote about their love affair with the Donald, describing the theme of these interviews as “bonhomie.” Erik Wemple explained, “Trump is often on the phone; some decent, journalistic questions get lobbed at Trump, often by Willie Geist; Trump makes more claims than the crew can possibly fact-check; and there’s a great deal of talk about polls.” When Willie Geist is asking the hard-hitting questions, you know you are in friendly territory.
Alas, that was then. If Scarborough’s most recent televised tirade against the former president tells us anything it is that the honeymoon is long over. Sitting next to the permanently nodding Mika, Joe ranted about the danger that is posed by candidate Donald Trump. “And if he is voted into office, then a lot of these people that are talking about literal, or figurative, or whatever the hell they’re saying, are going to look like idiots,” the host blustered. To be fair, if I was going to trust anyone on the subject of looking like an idiot, it would be Mr. Scarborough.
The fear-mongering wasn’t done just yet though. He continued, “Because he will do, he will get away with, he will imprison, he will execute, whoever he is allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country.”
Now, I know I am not as smart as Captain Literal or Figurative or Whatever but, I do have a pretty basic question to his assertion: why didn’t Trump do any of those things — the imprisoning, the executing, the driving — the first time around? Is Trump that diabolical, that he was patiently waiting to execute people for his second term? Perhaps Trump executed and imprisoned people in his first term and I just missed it. But considering the amount of media scrutiny he received after dumping a box of fish food into a Koi pond, I think Trump executing someone would have generated a good deal of attention. If “Trump having two scoops of ice cream at dinner” was a 24-hour news cycle, surely “Trump executes political opponent” would have warranted a few days worth of coverage, no?
Speaking of the first time around, a lot of people made these same kinds of melodramatic predictions back when Scarborough was busy socializing at Mar-a-Lago with his future bride-to-be. The brilliant Beltway experts on the alphabet networks talked incessantly about the horrors that would befall us if the terrible Orange Man were ever given the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, the Boston Globe ran an entire fake cover just to foment panic over what would happen to the country if Donald Trump were elected president.
MSNBC programming may be Trump-Derangement theater, but these doomsday actors are even less believable in the sequel. Top Gun: Maverick this ain’t. Like climate activists circling new dates on their calendars when the end of the world doesn’t materialize, these grifters simply move past their failed prognostications and start making a new one.
On X, Ben Domenech replied to the video of Scarborough’s screed and pointed out as much: “Looking at his (Trump’s) past disproves the thesis. The only way to argue this now is to say ‘he’s changed, he’s going to enact revenge, it will be different this time…’”
These phonies didn’t offer up any explanations as to why their dire predictions didn’t come to fruition during Trump’s first four years. And when they are wrong again, there will be no mea culpas from our betters in the mainstream media.
The only thing that these pompous sycophants are actually scared of is four years without Trump. The former president gave them ratings and book deals and relevance. Deep down they don’t think he is going to execute anyone. If anything he might be able to resuscitate quite a few dying careers in cable news.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that it is pretty rich that an MSNBC host is accusing Trump of wanting to kill people just a few days after New York congressman Dan Goldman called for Donald Trump to be eliminated on… MSNBC. Who said irony was dead?
