After accusing Trump of going ‘full-on Hitler,’ Joe Scarborough is complaining about our ‘coarsened’ political discourse.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at MSNBC’s role in creating an increasingly volatile political environment in America and cover more media misses.
Where’d You Go, Morning Joe?
Viewers might have expected Monday to be a huge day for MSNBC’s flagship morning talk show, Morning Joe, with all eyes on the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee — which is getting under way just days after former president Donald Trump survived an attempted assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally.
But instead, the program was suspiciously kept off the air.
A source told CNN the show was pulled to “avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.”
However, the move is perhaps too little too late; it would take little effort for an enterprising media column to look back at all of the ways the show has opened itself and the network up to criticism by stoking hatred against the former president.
While Trump and Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough were once friends, with Trump even frequently appearing on the program for many years, the relationship between the pair soured after Trump’s rise to political power.
Scarborough has spent significant time on the airwaves playing Chicken Little about the fall of democracy prophesied under the “dictator” Trump.
So today, we offer a look back at some of the show’s worst offenses in recent years.
For starters, Scarborough expressed concern as recently as May that there are voters who “don’t care that there is a candidate out there who talks about being a dictator from day one.”
His comment came after the Trump campaign reposted a supporter’s video that flashed several newspaper headlines, including one referring to a “Unified Reich” as a result of a hypothetical 2024 Trump victory.
While the campaign said the repost was shared in error by a staffer, Scarborough claimed Americans are “quietly, numbly, sleepwalking towards authoritarianism.”
Months earlier, Scarborough accused Trump of going “full-on Hitler” after the former president spoke about “vermin” living in our country that he would “root out” if reelected. Scarborough went on to say that Trump has “always had this fascist talk coming from him.”
Back in 2020, the Republican-turned-independent MSNBC host claimed Trump would “kill reporters if he could get away with it,” after the former president walked out of a 60 Minutes interview.
He likened Trump to “an autocratic leader from eastern Europe.”
“Actually though he kills journalists, Vladimir Putin, on camera, actually seems a little more willing to answer tough questions when they are asked of him,” Scarborough said at the time.
“Donald Trump can’t even handle that. Of course, Donald Trump would kill reporters if he could get away with it,” he said. “I think even his strongest supporters would admit Trump would do whatever he could get away with.”
After the assassination attempt on Saturday, that very same Scarborough wrote on X that he was praying to God to “deliver us from the violent political rhetoric that coursens [sic] debate and endangers public servants.”
And Scarborough’s guests haven’t been much better: Morning Joe guest John Heilemann has called Trump a “racist tin-pot dictator,” and, as a guest on the show in 2019, Democratic senator Jon Tester said the best way for Democrats to win states Trump won in 2016 would be to “punch him in the face.”
“I don’t think even in states where Donald Trump won big that it does you any good running away from Donald Trump,” he said at the time. “I think you need to go back and punch him in the face. I mean the truth is that this guy is bad for this country.”
Other MSNBC programming has been just as bad. Host Nicolle Wallace, speaking under an “American autocracy” chyron, warned viewers earlier this year that if Trump wins reelection in November there might not be a “free press” and suggested that he is a “candidate with outward disdain not just for a free press but for all of our freedoms and for the rule of law itself.”
Rachel Maddow, meanwhile, claimed Republicans are looking to “get rid of democracy.”
The liberal network is largely just following the lead of the Democratic Party’s leader.
Just last month, President Biden posted on X calling Trump a “genuine threat to this nation.”
“He’s a threat to our freedom,” the post added. “He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.”
In a separate post less than two weeks ago, Biden warned that Trump “really could become the dictator that he promised to be on day one,” after the Supreme Court ruled that the former president is immune to criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office, but affirmed that he can be prosecuted for unofficial acts.
Yet Biden called on Americans to take a step back and “lower the temperature in our politics” during a rare address from the Oval Office on Sunday, one day after Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet.
Biden went on to offer condolences to the family of former fire chief Corey Comperatore, 50, a victim of the shooting who died protecting his family from bullets. At least two other attendees were critically injured in the shooting.
The motive of 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks remains unclear and is still being investigated by law enforcement, Biden said Sunday evening.
The shooter, who was killed by a Secret Service sniper during the shooting, once donated to the Progressive Turnout Project, a left-wing voter turnout group that, just hours before the shooting, described the former president as a “threat to our democracy.” Crooks, a registered Republican, donated $15 to the far-left group on January 20, 2021 — the day of Biden’s inauguration.
In the wake of the shooting, it seemed like little had changed in the media’s approach to covering Trump.
Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan blasted those claiming that both parties need to tone down their rhetoric.
“Absurd. There is no Democratic/liberal equivalent to the nonstop incitement of violence from Trump, MTG, Gaetz, Gosar, Kari Lake, and others. The next few days of ‘both sides’ BS is going to kill me,” he said in a post on X.
Meanwhile, CNN’s Jamie Gangel criticized Trump for saying “Fight! Fight! Fight!” to the crowd when he rose to his feet just moments after the failed assassination attempt.
“That’s not the message that we want to be sending right now,” she said. “We want to tamp it down.”
CBS’s Margaret Brennan similarly questioned why Trump hadn’t gone far enough to discourage political violence in the first statement he released in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
“He is recovering from these injuries now, this was a traumatic event, no doubt, for him,” Brennan said. “But I did notice there was no call for lowering the temperature, condemning all political violence, and really trying to signal to his supporters as well not to retaliate or have any kind of escalation here.”
Over on ABC News, anchor George Stephanopoulos accused Trump and his supporters of contributing to “violent rhetoric.”
Martha Raddatz agreed. “We were just looking back this morning at some of the things President Trump has said,” she said. “He warned last March of potential death and destruction if he were charged by the Manhattan district attorney, ‘our country is being destroyed as they tell us to be peaceful.’ Trump in January warned of bedlam in the country if the criminal charges against him succeeded, and of course, in March he said, ‘Now if I don’t get elected . . . it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.’”
Raddatz, however, noted that the “bloodbath” quote had been taken out of context.
Still, she went on to cite the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot as further evidence of Trump and his supporters stoking political violence.
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki somehow made Trump’s shooting all about her.
“I’m incredibly scared,” the MSNBC host said. “I’m scared for journalists, I’m scared for people who have public platforms of all parties.”
Headline Fail of the Week
In a Forgotten Fact Checks first, we have a three-way tie for HFOTW.
First up, Sky News brings us “Nothing justified an assassination bid — but did Trump play a part in changing the rules of engagement?” — a headline so bad that the outlet quickly revised it to read, “US politics is laced with malevolence and division — it needs a reset.”
Up next, from Forbes: “Will Surviving Gunfire Be Donald Trump’s Next Appeal to Black Voters?”
“‘And the Blacks, they love me because they know the terrifying sound of gunshots,’ isn’t a claim that Trump has ‘actually’ made. Hopefully, he doesn’t. But it isn’t all that unthinkable,” wrote self-proclaimed DEI “expert” Shaun Harper in a since-deleted article for the outlet.
Finally, from Newsweek, perhaps the worst “Republicans pounce” of all time: “MAGA responds with outrage after Donald Trump injured at Pennsylvania rally.”
Media Misses
• One of these things is not like the others . . .
One of these guys was a KKK member, another left a young woman to die in a car he crashed. The third threw a snowball on the Senate floor once.
Guess which is which? pic.twitter.com/23QcyqiIvm
— Zach Parkinson (@AZachParkinson) July 9, 2024
• Readers looking for news about the failed assassination attempt against Trump in the immediate aftermath of the incident were met with little information from mainstream-media headlines, which painted a completely different version of events. “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally,” CNN reported. “Trump removed from stage by Secret Service after loud noises startles former president, crowd,” USA Today said. Perhaps some initial hesitation was warranted in the immediate aftermath of an extremely chaotic event, but several prominent outlets continued to bury the lede for hours after the news was staring editors in the face.
And perhaps worst of all, the print edition of the Sunday Denver Post led its front page with “Gunman dies in attack” in massive print, with “Trump says he was shot in the ear” in teeny tiny print.