Given how Joe Scarborough has vilified Donald Trump for years, the Morning Joe host could be the world's least likely character witness for the President.
But ironically, Scarborough's overt animus toward Trump makes him that much more credible when he says something positive about the President—as he did on today's Morning Joe. Scarborough swore that—having known Trump for 12 years—he had never in private heard him utter a racially-insensitive word.
"We [gestures toward Mika] saw him for 12 years behind closed doors. Never, ever, once—I'll say under oath, I'll put into an affidavit—never once heard him say anything close to being racially insensitive. Never once!"
Which is not to say that Scarborough was absolving Trump from allegedly playing the race card. To the contrary, Scarborough's point was to bemoan that whereas in private Trump can be congenial and non-racist, the President has supposedly made a conscious decision to adopt a combative, race-baiting public persona.
Three other tidbits of interest from today's Morning Joe.
- Scarborough is manifestly still smarting from Trump tweets about Joe and Mika. When Mika mentioned that Trump—angry about Cliff Sims' book about life inside the White House—is referring to former aide Sims as a "videographer," Scarborough comforts him by saying it could be worse. Joe claims that Trump called him a "murderer," also mentioning that Trump had tweeted about Mika bleeding from a facelift. Note: Trump never called Scarborough a "murderer," though he did call for an investigation into the death of a Scarborough aide in his congressional office years ago.
- Scarborough claims that even conservative "Trumpists" privately admit that President Trump is not up to the job. Scarborough predicts: "I think we're going to start seeing some really serious Republican challenges." I say that's bunk, unless some real bombshell emerges from Mueller or the Southern District.
- Finally, Barnicle, desperately tried yet again to make some sort of splash. He asks Sims: "do you have any children? So let me ask you, is there anything about the Trump presidency, about Donald Trump being President of the United States, that scares you?" It was a particularly cheap shot for Barnicle to drag children into the matter—shades of the Daisy ad! Note: Sims said nothing about Trump scares him, and that Trump takes big decisions like those about war seriously.
