On Saturday's AM Joy on MSNBC, during a discussion of the Tea Party movement's origin and evolution, Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin charged that the movement is "angry about race" because President Donald Trump gave them permission to be, and ended up calling the GOP a "wackadoodle party."
Host Joy Reid oddly continued to identify Rubin as "conservative" in spite of all the liberal positions she has taken on a number of issues since she began appearing regularly as a commentator on MSNBC.
At 11:06 a.m. Eastern, host Reid posed: "Are you surprised -- as somebody who has yourself traversed the ideological play -- you are not conservative anymore? I mean, you're conservative, not a Republican."
Rubin implicated racism in the Tea Party movement as she asserted:
I think what they were motivated [by] was anger -- and you can say it was racial anger or you can say it was anger simply about losing an election, but when Donald Trump came around and gave them permission to be angry about race, to be angry about immigrants, to be angry about elites, they said, "Yeah, that's what we're really angry about."
Referring to Republicans, she soon added: "The party is no longer even pretending to be the party of small government -- they are the Trump party. This is a nativist, protectionist, big government kind of wackadoodle party which is all about power -- which is all about this cult of Donald Trump."
A bit later, Reid continued to count Rubin as conservative as she turned to her three guests and posed: "Is there a base for that version of conservatism beyond the three people that are on screen with me right now?"
