On Wednesday's Morning Joe, discussing an excerpt in The Atlantic of Kamala Harris' forthcoming book in which she attributes Joe Biden's decision to run in 2024 on ego or recklessness, Joe Scarborough said:
"I can understand everybody wringing their hands saying, why didn't we step in? Why didn't we intervene? . . . And the further you get away from it, the further you realize that Joe Biden and Jill Biden were not going to be talked out of anything until the pressure was overwhelming."
But Scarborough never tried! Despite having boasted about his close connection and frequent conversations with Biden, Scarborough never once hinted that Biden was unfit for office.
To the contrary, with his infamous "best Biden ever, and f-you if you don't believe it," Scarborough, just three months before Biden's disastrous debate performance, vouched for Biden's fitness and encouraged him to remain in the race.
Scarborough doubled down on that today, but in doing so, inadvertently made the case against Biden. Scarborough admitted:
"When I saw him, he was slow. He was, you know, plodding. He was, his neck was stiff. Everything was really stiff. And you're like, ugh, he walks around slowly. But when he sat down, may have spoken more quietly and more haltingly. But, man, I never once saw him where he blanked out."
Biden never blanked out! Heckuva recommendation, Joe!
Scarborough went on to suggest that in their conversations, Biden exhibited a better grasp of foreign policy than possibly anyone in the current Trump administration.
But even if that's true [and I'd put Marco Rubio up against Biden in a foreign policy Double Jeopardy face-off] an 81-year-old who is slow, plodding, really stiff, and who walks and speaks slowly and haltingly, was patently unfit to serve four more years as president.
Scarborough surely realized that, but chose abject sycophancy instead.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
9/10/25
7:07 am EDTMIKA BRZEZINSKI: The Atlantic has published an excerpt from former Vice President Kamala Harris's forthcoming new book entitled 107 Days. And in it, Harris details the challenges she faced when Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she was suddenly tapped to run for president.
In it, she writes, "During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. It's Joe and Jill's decision. We all said that, like a mantra, as if we'd all been hypnotized. Was it grace or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn't a choice that should have been left to an individual's ego, an individual's ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision."
"I was well aware of my delicate status. Lore has it that every outgoing chief of staff always tells the incoming president's chief of staff, rule number one, watch the VP. I often learned that the president's staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. When the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president's inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more. Their thinking was zero sum. If she's shining, he's dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well, that given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands."
. . .
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I can understand everybody wringing their hands saying, why didn't we step in? Why didn't we intervene? I can understand the vice president, Vice President Harris doing that.
But people that know Joe Biden and Jill Biden know, speaking of jump balls, nobody was going to take that ball from their hands. They were determined. I mean, I, I talked to a lot of people. I knew a lot of people around the Bidens. And the further you get away from it, the further you realize that Joe Biden and Jill Biden were not going to be talked out of anything until the pressure was overwhelming.
. . .I've talked time and again about the hours that I spent with Joe Biden and the fact that he knew more about foreign policy than anybody that I've been around. If he hadn't, I would have said so on the show. I just would have said so. You also know people that sat with him in the sit [situation] room. You know people that were around him and listened to him talking for hours.
Now, I will say, when I saw him, he was slow. He was, you know, plodding. He was, his neck was stiff. Everything was really stiff. And you're like, ugh, he walks around slowly. But when he sat down, may have spoken more quietly and more haltingly. But, man, I never once saw him where he blanked out.
Never once saw him where, I will just say, a lot of people in this administration. I haven't seen a lot of people in this administration that could have kept up with him on foreign policy, especially when he started talking about foreign policy, because he'd been doing it for 40, 45 years.
