Former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough has lost it at the president’s State of the Union address, claiming his words were not those of a sane man.
Morning Joe host Scarborough laid into President Donald Trump’s “lying” during Tuesday’s speech, saying he was astonished hearing the president’s “bigotry” and “s--- that no sane president would ever do.”
The president, 79, smashed his own record with the 108-minute address. In a lengthy monologue of his own at the top of Wednesday’s show, Scarborough, 62, laid into Trump.
Scarborough also mocked an unnamed broadcaster who called Trump’s address “extraordinary,” before saying, “Yes, it was extraordinary. It was extraordinary for many reasons... he did s--- that no sane president would ever do. It was really, really crazy to be watching that in a State of the Union address.”
The MS Now host’s words concluded a breakdown of some of the most eyebrow-raising parts of the State of the Union.
“I will say there are a couple of things that I thought were extraordinary that you wouldn’t see in other State of the Unions unless they were Donald Trump’s,” he began. “The first, of course, was just the unrelenting bigotry, the lies, the attacking of one group, specifically the Somalis, Somali Americans.”
Scarborough continued, “That’s the sort of thing that, you know, I’m not going to talk about fascists or Nazis. You just read history and see what type of regimes will pick one or two groups and blame all of America’s ills on those groups. That’s one of the things that the president did.”
One of the Trump administration’s major talking points this year has been the ongoing investigation into fraud in Minnesota. The issue has only had a spotlight shone on it by the administration and MAGA influencers now, despite being ongoing since at least 2022. The saga has dovetailed with unrest and clashes between protesters and ICE agents, which led to the shooting deaths of two Americans, Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
“Another thing that he did was generally talking about immigration,” Scarborough continued. “Again, it’s un-American. It goes against what the Republican Party has always stood for. It’s gone against what Ronald Reagan stood for,” Scarborough raged.
The host tore into Trump and the Republican party for “this continued lie,” that immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than U.S. citizens born in the country. “Every study, one study after another, study after another study, shows this is a tired lie,” Scarborough said. “And yet you have an entire party that seems in large part to be based upon this lie.”
The immigration crackdown, masterminded by White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and enacted by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, has relied on the narrative that “the worst of the worst” criminals are being arrested and deported. However, a Guardian report on Sunday suggested that 77 percent of those who entered the deportation process for the first time last year had no criminal history.
“Speaking of lies,” Scarborough continued, “Everybody knows in the audience, they understand Donald Trump is lying when he’s saying that the price of meat is going down, the price of groceries are going down. They know he’s lying when he says that he inherited inflation at 9 percent. No.”
Scarborough said, “He inherited inflation at about the same rate that it’s at right now when Joe Biden left office. It’s about the same as where it was.”
Since his return to the White House in January last year, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has been the architect of a booming economy hindered only by the errors of the last administration.
Despite the rhetoric, several polls suggest that Americans aren’t feeling the promised windfalls in their wallets.
Scarborough also mentioned Trump’s frequently-beaten drum, again banged on Tuesday, about “election conspiracies”, saying he thought that, as far as Trump is concerned, “There’s no way Democrats can win without this cheating.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
