Yesterday, I was ready to predict that Joe Scarborough would open today's Morning Joe with the clip of Donald Trump confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, saying that on January 6th, he had offered Haley 10,000 troops.
But then Ron DeSantis announced his withdrawal from the race. Huge political news! So there went my prediction.
But no! Despite the DeSantis withdrawal, Scarborough did indeed open today's Morning Joe with that clip of Trump confusing Haley and Pelosi. It's a sign of just how desperately Scarborough wants to offset Biden's blatant senility by beating the drum, as we noted last week, of Trump supposedly being "dazed and confused." He's channeling all the hardened Democrats using the Twitter hashtag #DementiaDon.
But in its second half-hour, today's show eventually got around to the DeSantis news--and did so with a nasty smirk. Katty Kay kicked things off. You might imagine that BBCer Kay represents the more refined wing of the liberal media. But there she was with a mocking laugh as she suggested to Charlie Sykes that they do a DeSantis post-mortem, "before we consign him to oblivion and forget his name." Klassy Katty!
Scarborough took it from there. His theme was that Trump is "Fat Elvis," the "sweaty Fat Elvis" of 1977, and that's what his fans want. Thus, they were not going to switch to a knock-off Fat Elvis in the person of DeSantis. According to Scarborough, DeSantis needed to find another lane, but never did so.
Scarborough was so enthralled with his Fat Elvis analogy that he proclaimed it a "perfect, perfect analogy. Because who in the hell is going to go see a knock-off of Donald Trump 2024?"
Trump as Fat Elvis is a classic analogy for liberal snobs like Scarborough who summer on Nantucket. After all, in their eyes, people who loved past-his-prime Elvis were just those dumb Southerners, and bumpkins from across the fruited plain.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
1/22/24
6:37 am ETKATTY KAY: Charlie, let's do a little bit of the post-mortem before we consign him to oblivion and forget his name [laughs.] Let's do a bit of a postmortem on Ron DeSantis.
. . .
JOE SCARBOROUGH: It seems to me that you, you, you have a choice. You have to pick a lane. And Donald Trump had the MAGA lane, had the extreme MAGA lane.
And so, here you had Fat Elvis '77, and you had Ron DeSantis saying, I'm going to go to Vegas, and I'm going to fill that lane, right? Why, why? Like, if you can't, if that lane's already filled, then do the Beatles! If you can't do the Beatles, do Dylan. If you can't do the Dylan, be the Fifth Dimension. Be anybody, but don't try to be Fat Elvis! [Shouts] They got that on the strip!
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: A lot of it.
SCARBOROUGH: [Still shouting] They got a lot of it, right? You're never going to get people --
MIKA: So much.
SCARBOROUGH: -- Heilemann, if somebody has followed Elvis since '57,they're not going to drive to Vegas in '77 and say, "Hey, I'm going to go see the Fat Elvis imitator." No! They're going to see Elvis! And they're going to get the sweaty, fat guy with, you know, pulling off, pulling off the -- you know, throwing his scarves into the crowd.
And people think, like, I'm joking. No, this is a perfect, perfect analogy. Because who in the hell is going to go see a knock-off of Donald Trump 2024?
