Joe Scarborough of MSNBC on Monday expressed concerns about Donald Trump’s well-being and delivered a stark cautionary message about his conduct as the former president seeks reelection.
During a discussion on “Morning Joe” with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, they delved into Trump’s authoritarian ambitions for another White House term, mutually agreeing that the threat to democracy had not received adequate attention.
Scarborough questioned the media’s contrasting treatment of Trump’s language compared to that of Hillary Clinton, citing the use of Nazi terminology and derogatory terms like ‘vermin.’ He pointed out the apparent lack of coverage for such instances and sought an explanation for this discrepancy.
“Why is it that when Hillary Clinton says the word ‘deplorable’ in a speech, it is banner headlines for a month, it seems,” he said. “When Donald Trump uses Nazi terminology to degrade human beings, uses ‘vermin,’ you hardly hear about it. Why is that?”
Goldberg attributed this phenomenon to normalization, emphasizing that humans have a tendency to adapt to various situations, even those that might be abnormal. He highlighted Trump’s unique ability to push rhetorical boundaries, suggesting that people had grown accustomed to it, treating it as mere background noise.
“I think it is normalization,” Goldberg asserted. “I think it’s this process where, one of the great attributes of human beings is we can get used to anything, right? So we got used to this, and we just accepted it as background noise. I mean, he does have these — this particular superpower, in that he goes further than anybody in rhetoric, and we kind of go, ‘Yeah, it’s just Donald Trump.’ We have to reverse that and just say, ‘No, no, no, no, no – this is a former president of the United States.'”
“If Barack Obama, if George W. Bush said the things, as a former president, not running again, that Donald Trump said, we’d have huge stories about, ‘Former president loses mind,’ right? Meanwhile, Donald Trump is the putative nominee for the presidency, and here we are. We act like it’s normal,” he concluded.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski joined the conversation, echoing the sentiment that normalization posed a significant danger and needed to be reversed urgently.
“That’s why this issue is so important,” agreed co-host Mika Brzezinski. “It is normalization and we need to reverse that, because normalization is exactly how it starts, and it is dangerous.”
Scarborough further emphasized the double standard in media coverage, pointing out that if previous presidents like Barack Obama or George W. Bush had made similar statements, the reaction would have been markedly different.
“If Barack Obama had said a general should have been executed , how long would that — how long?” Scarborough said. He concluded with a serious note on Trump’s appearance, expressing a genuine concern about the former president’s health and demeanor on stage, suggesting that something seemed amiss.
“There is something wrong with Donald Trump. I’m serious, he doesn’t look right up on stage, he doesn’t. You look at him – we’ve known him,” he said.
Here’s the discussion below from MSNBC:
