MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough unloaded on Republican governors who agreed to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., at President Donald Trump’s request—despite their own states battling higher crime rates.
Scarborough singled out Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee during his Tuesday morning rant. Late last month, Lee announced he would deploy troops to the capital as part of Trump’s high-profile crackdown.
“What an idiot,” Scarborough said. “Seriously, I mean, what an idiot. You’re actually going to help Washington, D.C., when you have cities that have twice the crime rate in your own state.”
He compared Lee’s decision to the argument California Gov. Gavin Newsom has used against House Speaker Mike Johnson. “Oh, wait, you’re attacking San Francisco,” Scarborough paraphrased.
“San Francisco’s a lot safer than Shreveport and Monroe, which is right outside your district. What do you say? You’re something like 400 times more likely to get killed in Speaker Johnson’s home state of Louisiana than in, as he’s probably saying now, the greatest governor in the world, Gavin Newsom’s California.”
Scarborough said the deployments were about loyalty to Trump, not public safety. “That’s the insanity of this,” he added.
“These red state governors sending National Guard up to D.C. when D.C. probably has a lower crime rate per capita than their home states. It’s all to please President Trump, so you’ve got a guy, a National Guardsman from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, being called up not to protect his own state, but to go to Washington and stand outside the Lincoln Memorial.”
He noted that governors in Texas, Ohio, and Missouri had also committed troops, even though their states include cities with higher per-capita crime than the nation’s capital.
Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, also dropped in a music reference. “It’s all show biz, as John Lennon would sing in “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out)”,” he said.
From there, Scarborough rattled off a list of cities he argued face more pressing safety concerns than Washington.
“Whether it’s Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Louisiana, whether it’s Bessemer, Alabama, whether it’s Shreveport, Louisiana, whether it’s Monroe, Louisiana, whether it’s Little Rock, Arkansas,” he said.
“I could keep going on and on and on, but there are midsize and large American cities that are far more dangerous per capita than Washington, D.C., and these clowns of governors are actually sending National Guard troops away from their more dangerous cities to go pose in front of a Krispy Kreme donut shop in Dupont Circle.”
