“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough is calling it: Former president Donald Trump’s favorite news network might be taking a step back.
While an announcement from Trump that he’s running for office again in 2024 is imminent, Scarborough said on Monday that it “seems pretty obvious that Fox News has left the Trump train” for the GOP 2024 presidential ticket in favor of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Whenever you talk to people close to Trump [about] the question of whether he’s going to run for reelection or not after the drubbing in 2018, [they say] of course he’s gonna run for reelection,” Scarborough said of the likelihood of Trump gunning for the ballot. “That’s his ticket. He’s got too much hanging over him liability-wise.”
But the host noted that Trump is “really showing signs of weakness out there” as the midterm elections approach, which can’t bode well for 2024. Fundraising for GOP candidates going into November is flagging compared to their Democratic counterparts – a pattern that Scarborough credits to the left’s “political athleticism” over ideology; the “extreme positions that Republicans are taking,” as ushered in by Trump; and a lack of quality candidates.
Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz is one example of where the left is getting their punches in by easily framing him as a rich man from New Jersey, despite running in the Keystone State. Scarborough further jabs that a candidate like Herschel Walker, running for Senate in Georgia, “makes Donald Trump on Donald Trump’s worst days sound like Daniel Webster.”
Then, nodding to a video that Fox News Digital ran this weekend highlighting Republicans in Arizona who support DeSantis for a presidential bid over Trump, Scarborough posed that the former network ally appears to be jumping ship.
“I saw a clip on Fox last night that was in my Twitter feed, and it seems pretty obvious that Fox News has left the Trump train and they are jumping on the DeSantis express. And he sees all of this happening while he’s sitting in Mara Lago. It doesn’t seem like he’s going to be able to sit back much longer,” Scarborough said.
You can watch the “Morning Joe” segment in the video above.
