If there’s one thing Joe Scarborough loves more than a hot cup of coffee, it’s calling out political hypocrisy with receipts—and Monday morning, JD Vance served him a fresh one on a silver platter.
On Morning Joe, Scarborough lit into Vice President JD Vance after the Ohio Republican tried to paint Democrats as the villains behind what now looks like an inevitable government shutdown. The problem? Just a year ago, Vance was championing shutdown brinkmanship like it was gospel.
“I think we’re headed to a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing,” Vance complained Monday, after weekend talks between President Donald Trump and congressional leaders fell apart. But those comments didn’t sit well with Scarborough—or anyone with a memory longer than a goldfish.
Morning Joe’s producers immediately dug up footage of Vance outside the White House last year, standing tall with his MAGA crew and condemning shutdown threats.
“We have disagreements about tax policy, but you don’t shut that government down. We have disagreements about healthcare policy, but you don’t shut the government down,” Vance had said back then. “You don’t use your policy disagreements as leverage to not pay our troops, to not have essential services of government actually function.”
Scarborough could barely contain himself.
“So. I’m easily confused, as everybody knows,” he began, eyes wide in disbelief. “I mean, he was the guy who said that Donald Trump might be America’s Hitler. And then he changed. He’s a guy that said, God expects more from us than to vote for Donald Trump. JD did. And then he changed.”
Then came the kicker.
“And Mika, didn’t he say like, not so long ago, that this is exactly when you use your leverage to try to get the other party to change… Didn’t he say, I don’t know, am I dreaming? Is this like, is this like a dream from Dallas where it’s the next season? I don’t know.”
(Dallas fans will remember—that’s a reference to the infamous plot twist where a whole season was revealed to be just a dream.)
Co-host Mika Brzezinski jumped in: “Let’s take a look.”
Cue the clip from Vance’s appearance on The Shawn Ryan Show in September 2024, where he’s heard saying: “Yeah, man. Why, why, why shouldn’t we be trying to force this government shutdown fight to get something out of it that’s good for the American people? Like, why have a government if it’s not a functioning government?”
Scarborough’s reaction? “What a shock. That’s just one year ago. Oh, I thought that might be a decade ago!”
And just like that, Vance’s talking points collapsed under the weight of his own contradictions.
Scarborough, a former GOP congressman himself, then turned to history to drive it home.
“When the government shut down, they’re gonna blame Republicans,” he warned. “Bill Clinton broke us, politically got reelected. It worked in his favor when there was a shutdown.”
He’s not wrong. The 1995–96 shutdowns left Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republicans bloodied while Clinton soared. Same story in 2013, when Republicans tried to defund the Affordable Care Act and triggered another shutdown—again, Obama came out looking like the adult in the room.
Watch the clip from MSNBC below.
