Monday’s Morning Joe began with a trip to the dark side as co-host Joe Scarborough fawned over Barack Obama’s tweet criticizing the Republican health care bill. He then proposed that the former president had persuaded Donald Trump to say the same in an interview via a "Jedi mind trick." Comparisons to Luke Skywalker quickly followed as members of the panel praised this demonstration of Obama’s “amazing power.” Trump, on the other hand, was compared, unsurprisingly, to none other than the notorious space slug, Jabba the Hutt.
In a recent interview with Fox & Friends, President Trump responded to a question concerning whether or not the Republican health care bill was “mean” as referred to by Obama. Trump stated that the word had actually first been used by him, calling it “my term” before stating that he wanted a bill with “heart.” Scarborough took this as evidence that Obama had used the force to influence Trump:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I don't know about you guys, we have Star Wars fans here? Anybody Star Wars fans?
JOHN HEILEMANN: Oh yeah. Big. Big.
SCARBOROUGH: You just -- you didn't know exactly where Barack Obama went, but if you saw seven he obviously went to the island where Luke went, and he has come back with these extraordinary Jedi mind tricks. Because everybody -- the seventeen intel agents, everybody has been trying to get him to admit, every reporter in Washington, that the Russians meddled with our elections.
HEILEMANN: Trump. President Trump
SCARBOROUGH: Trump, right. And Barack Obama comes back and says the Russians meddled with our elections and he writes a tweet. The Russians meddled with our elections. And he says your health care plan is mean. And he goes my health care plan is mean! It's unbelievable!
GEIST: The force is strong within him.
SCARBOROUGH: The force is strong with this one. Hmmmm! Obama! Strong the force is with his family.
GEIST: The president he was.
SCARBOROUGH: So let's break this down, Mark Halperin, how many people have tried to get Donald Trump to admit the Russians meddled with the 2016 elections?
MARK HALPERIN Many, many.
HEILEMANN: I have a precise number here. 924,321.
SCARBOROUGH: And so all Barack Obama has to do is just come back on the scene in his Jedi garb, right.
ELISE JORDAN: And he just forces the president say things about this health care bill that really could hurt it politically. Really hamper its passage. That's something that President Obama really has power!
SCARBOROUGH: He does have power, and we have a clip of him right here doing this. And it's unbelievable.
OBI-WAN KENOBI: These aren't the droids you're looking for.
STORMTROOPER: These aren't the droids we're looking for.
SCARBOROUGH: It's unbelievable. Eddie, that is an amazing power. He can use it for good or for ill.
EDDIE GLAUDE JR: I'm not a Star Wars guy --
SCARBOROUGH: Well, you should be.
GLAUDE: Is it the case the force works depending upon the intelligence level?
SCARBOROUGH: Yes, it does.
GLAUDE: I just wanted to make sure.
SCARBOROUGH: It does. For good or for evil. The force worked, of course, as we all know, worked on Jabba’s guards but not on Jabba himself.
HEILEMANN: The hutt was too smart for that.
SCARBOROUGH: The hutt was impervious to Jedi mind tricks. But, not this Trump fellow. That really is incredible.
This is not the first time Obama has been compared to a Jedi by the liberal media. Time magazine acknowledged him as an “Obi-Wan Kenobi” Jedi in 2008 and Mark Hamill said the same during a segment of Young Turks in 2012.
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