Joe Scarborough unloaded on Republican leaders, accusing them of “lying through their teeth” about the government shutdown.
The MSNBC mainstay dragged the White House, Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson into his furious Tuesday takedown. “This isn’t debatable,” Scarborough told co-host Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe. “Over the past week there have been extreme cases—just unambiguous lies.”
Scarborough then zeroed in on Vance, who claimed that “most political violence is coming from the left.” That statement, he said, was flat-out false.
“That’s an unambiguous lie,” Scarborough said. “Every statistic shows the overwhelming amount of political violence comes from the extreme right. Not that we’re blaming anybody, which is exactly what Republicans and their talking heads on other networks and podcasts do. But that was just a lie. He knew he was lying, and everybody that repeats that lie knows the vice president’s lying about that.”
He then turned his fire on Johnson, accusing him of using the looming shutdown as an excuse to spread another provable falsehood.
“This time it’s the Speaker of the House, Mr. ‘I’m ruled by the Bible,’ spreading an unambiguous lie,” Scarborough fumed.
“They’re lying to their own supporters, their own constituents, their own followers, saying Democrats want to shut down the government because they want to give great health-care benefits to illegal immigrants. It’s a total lie.”
Scarborough mocked Johnson’s professed religious devotion, skewering him for weaponizing faith while amplifying conspiracy theories.
“Where in the Bible does Mike Johnson read Jesus saying, ‘Tell the truth—except when it might serve you politically, and then just lie’?” Scarborough asked. “And while you’re lying, why spread lies about those on the outskirts of society, the weakest among us, those suffering the most?”
The Morning Joe host argued that the strategy is deliberate, designed to mislead Republican voters about the source of the shutdown crisis while vilifying immigrants.
“The president’s spreading the lie. All the Republicans are lying through their teeth,” he said. “And any podcaster today that spreads this lie, anybody on other news networks that spreads this lie knows exactly what they’re doing.”
Scarborough finished with a reminder: “There is no Democratic plan to give Cadillac health-care benefits to illegal immigrants. It’s not even legal.”
The blistering rebuke comes as the government shutdown begins its first full day, with millions of federal workers furloughed and vital services frozen.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson responded by blaming Democrats for shutting down the government. “The Trump Administration wants a straightforward and clean CR to continue funding the government–the exact same proposal that Democrats supported just 6 months ago, 13 times under the Biden Administration,” she told the Daily Beast.
“But radical Democrats shut down the government because they want a nearly $1.5 trillion wish list of demands, including free health care for illegal aliens. The Democrats’ radical agenda was rejected by the American people less than a year ago at the ballot box, now they shut down the government and hold the American people hostage over it.”
