Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough called Democrats to task in no uncertain terms Friday morning over the party’s widely-perceived failure to call out President Trump’s “nonsense.”
Scarborough and a panel discussed the second term president’s first speech to Congress Tuesday night, where he bent the facts on a series of issues, including Social Security. At one point during his rambling 100-minute address, he claimed that some 130,000 people listed as older than 160—and millions more of other apparent super-centenarians in the U.S.—were still getting checks, despite being long dead.
The panel reacted in disbelief that some Trump supporters believe such spurious claims. Scarborough, in particular, got fired up after political commentator Chris Matthews likened the president to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, saying “it’s about believing the leader in what he says verbatim. And that’s what Trump does on television.”
He then launched into a tirade, shouting “where are the Democrats when he starts saying this nonsense?!”
The polemic was actually posed as a question to Washington Post associate editor Eugene Robinson, who had to watch Scarborough melt down for two minutes before he got to answer. (Robinson eventually agreed that Trump’s rhetoric was not “effectively refuted.”)
“Donald Trump stands up and says things that just aren’t true. You know, he repeats it over and over and over again,” Scarborough raged. ”So Americans, what are they to think?”
“I’ve been in Congress. I can tell you it’s not harder than it looks,” he continued of opportunities for pushback and dissent. “Where are the Democrats when he starts saying this nonsense? Why don’t they get one person out there who can communicate extraordinarily well? Why can’t somebody go up there like Barack Obama would have done, like Bill Clinton would have done, and just sit there and laugh.”
Scarborough, who sat in the House of Representatives for Florida’s 1st district from 1995 to 2001, said “we used to do this all the time in Congress.”
Trump’s Social Security claims—including that some 3.9 million people listed between the ages of 130 to 139, and a further 3.5 million people between the ages 140 to 149, are receiving Social Security payments because they haven’t been recorded as deceased—were later rebuffed, by a number of sources including The Washington Post, which quoted a 2023 Social Security Administration report to clear up the numbers.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale also addressed the issue in a segment with Jake Tapper this week, explaining that Social Security Administration “has a system in place to automatically cut off people who are listed as being 115 or older.” He added that an Inspector General report found two years ago that there were 19 million people not properly marked as deceased, but only some 44,000 were receiving payments.
