Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough laughed out loud after replaying a clip of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s on-air attempt to defend one of President Donald Trump’s “mathematically impossible” claims.
Scarborough lost it while listening to Lutnick, a billionaire Trump administration official, try to explain the president’s claim that he was cutting drug prices by as much as “600 percent.”
Fox anchor John Roberts on Thursday pressed Lutnick about Trump’s remarks from a primetime address the night before. Roberts noted that what Trump said was “mathematically impossible.”
But Lutnick tried to defend the president in rambling comments. “It just depends on how you look at it,” the commerce secretary replied.
“It all depends on how you look at it,” Scarborough repeated on Morning Joe, mocking the Trump official’s explanation.
“And if you’re willing to look really stupid while you look at it. The only thing missing there was Judy Collins in the background singing ‘Send in the Clowns’ and then ending by saying: ‘Don’t bother, they’re here!’” the host joked, escalating his jab.
Scarborough criticized Lutnick for offering what he called a “bizarre explanation” rather than simply acknowledging that Trump was wrong and had exaggerated.
“Nothing can go down 600 percent and there’s no way when you buy a drug, the drug company is going to pay you six times the amount they were going to charge you,” Scarborough said.
“Just one more exaggeration and one more example of somebody just looking kind of dumb trying to twist themselves in knots to explain the unexplainable that keeps coming out of this White House,” Scarborough added. “And it seems to be coming out in rapid succession,”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Trump’s inaccurate ramblings on drug prices on Wednesday came as part of a broader effort to counter growing public dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy, as cost-of-living pressures continue to drag down his approval ratings.
Pressure is mounting on the president, who campaigned on lowering grocery prices.
Late last month, Trump’s ratings dipped to the lowest levels of his second term. Meanwhile, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that just 33 percent of U.S. adults approved of his handling of the economy.
