MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough is baffled. He can’t understand why Donald Trump keeps defending Russian president Vladimir Putin—especially while Putin continues bombing Ukraine and mocking Trump in Russian media.
“It was fascinating yesterday – fascinating, I guess, is one word you could use – fascinating yesterday that the president continued to talk about and lobby for Russia’s admittance,” Scarborough said on Morning Joe. He was reacting to Trump’s renewed push to bring Russia back into the G8, the group of the world’s major industrialized nations. Russia was kicked out in 2014 after it invaded and seized Crimea from Ukraine.
Scarborough didn’t hold back: “Putin’s admittance into what would be the G8 when he was kicked out for invading Crimea, and now these pleas by the president are being made, or these complaints being made at the same time he is killing more more residents of Kyiv in an overnight attack and bombing hospitals in Ukraine.”
Scarborough made it clear how strange he finds Trump’s timing. While Kyiv is under deadly assault, Trump is busy lobbying for Putin. And this isn’t just tone-deaf—it’s personal.
“Vladimir Putin has, you know, he’s basically, he’s embarrassed Donald Trump,” Scarborough said. “Russian state television has had fun at president Trump’s expense, and yet he’s still lobbying using his position as America’s president to lobby to get Putin and Russia back into the G8.”
“So again, a very strange, bizarre time to start talking about readmitting someone who had been kicked out in the first place for breaking treaties and invading Ukrainian space,” he added. “I’m sure, again, a lot of head-scratching going on in Canada yesterday.”
Scarborough’s co-host, Jonathan Lemire, agreed. He said people close to Trump are also puzzled.
“I wrote a piece a month or so back when Putin denied another U.S. offer for a ceasefire and talked to people in Trump’s world who speculated [that] eventually Trump’s going to feel humiliated by Putin and maybe turn against him,” Lemire said. “Well, that hasn’t happened yet.”
In fact, Trump is doubling down. Just as Russia carried out one of its deadliest missile attacks on Kyiv, Trump was still pushing for Putin to rejoin the G8. And he even suggested that he and Putin could somehow team up to negotiate peace between Israel and Iran.
Lemire didn’t miss the irony: “He has, despite over 80 sponsors, 80, completely bipartisan effort, really tough sanctions against Russia and secondary sanctions against those who do business with Russia, which could really cripple Moscow’s economy that’s sitting there, ready for him – he will not endorse it. He has not said he would sign it, at least not yet.”
Watch the segment below from MSNBC:
