The standards of evidence at liberal cable-news channels are not high. With Donald Trump, gossip and unproven rumors from anonymous sources will suffice. During an interview with anti-Trump author Michael Wolff on Monday, MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough complained that he has twice tried to include unproven references to President Trump being in an early stage of dementia in his columns for the Washington Post, but both times the editors told him to remove those references.
“There is such a reluctance, and I'm not, certainly not knocking The Washington Post. They're actually being conservative with a small C. I’ve written twice in my column a quote about one of [the] people closest to Donald Trump during the campaign saying he’s got early stage of dementia. He repeats the same stories over and over again, his father had it and it's getting worse, and not a single person that works for him doesn’t know he has early signs of dementia. Now of course, they didn't think he was gonna win."
So Scarborough protested again: "But twice The Washington Post would not let me put that in my column, which again, I salute them for having a high bar. But we are at this moment, and until your book came out, this was something we were not allowed to speak about.”
Note the clumsy Morning Joe dance: I think the Post is way too cautious, but I salute them! Thank you for publishing my Trump rants, you cautious cowards!
MSNBC doesn't have any of that caution. On November 30, Joe "reported" just like Wolff to his morning audience that "people close to him during the campaign told me had early stages of dementia." He wasn't that bold on May 2, but just hinted "I'm not saying that Donald Trump has dementia, but my mother has dementia. She lives in the moment. She forgets what she said a day ago, a week ago. We can't have presidents that do that. And I'm not saying that he has dementia. I will leave that to his physician to figure that out.”
Scarborough's latest Washington Post column lauds Wolff for identifying Trump as unfit: "Michael Wolff's tantalizing takedown of President Trump's White House is so tightly packed with tales of political convulsion and personal betrayal that official Washington will be buzzing off its sugar high for weeks. But after the shock of Wolff's account of Trump's willful ignorance and intellectual incoherence fades, Americans will be left with the inescapable conclusion that the president is not capable of fulfilling his duties as commander in chief."
