During Thursday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough tore into House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for cowering before “failed TV host” Donald Trump.
Scarborough, a former Republican lawmaker himself, said he’s baffled that Republican lawmakers privately loathe and deeply distrust Trump, but keep their concerns to themselves as Trump threatens to destroy our democracy.
The Morning Joe host began by singling out McCarthy: “Everybody has been running scared of this guy from the very beginning, and, again, let’s go back. I want to go back really quickly to 2016 because how instructive is it that Kevin McCarthy actually said that he thought seriously, he thought Donald Trump was paid off by Vladimir Putin along with Dana Rohrabacher,” Scarborough said. “A lot of other people, of course, thought that about Rohrabacher. He was throwing that in with Donald Trump, he still endorsed him. He got behind him.”
“This is about the same time that Paul Ryan, a longtime good friend of mine who was around when we ran Newt Gingrich out of town, you had Paul Ryan calling Donald Trump a racist, saying what he said in 2016 was about the most racist thing you could say. He endorsed him the next day,” he added.
“I don’t understand this, I can’t even comprehend it,” Scarborough said. “I have never seen anything like it, and yet this is how Republicans on the Hill have been acting since 2016. I never acted that way on the Hill. All of my friends, we never acted that way on the Hill. We just didn’t do it. I’m not exactly sure how Donald Trump changed the equation for these spineless, feckless Republicans. I don’t know how Donald Trump hijacked the party and at the same time made these Republicans cower the way they’re cowering. Again, you just compare what they say behind the scenes.”
According to a new book by two New York Times reporters, GOP congressional leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell intended to pressure Trump to resign after the Jan. 6 insurrection but backed down when they realized they could lose their leadership roles, and Scarborough said that shows that, for them, power is more important than the country.
Watch the segment below:
