MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough has ripped Donald Trump’s “feigned ignorance” about the Ku Klux Klan.
In the former Republican congressman’s latest Washington Post op-ed since starting his side gig as a political and media contributor for the paper’s opinion pages, Scarborough criticized the GOP presidential candidate for needing additional information on the KKK before condemning the group and former leader David Duke.
“The harsher reality is that the next GOP nominee will be a man who refused to condemn the Klu Klux Klan and one if its most infamous grand wizards when telling the ugly truth wouldn’t have cost him a single vote,” Scarborough wrote.
Scarborough has recently been accused of being a little too close with Trump and was criticized of asking him softball questions during a recent MSNBC town hall event.
Meanwhile, Media Matters has dug up a 1991 interview when Trump went on CNN’s “Larry King Live” to condemn Duke, who was then running for governor of Louisiana at the time. King asked, “Did the David Duke thing bother you? Fifty-five percent of the whites in Louisiana voted for him.”
“I hate seeing what it represents, but I guess it just shows there’s a lot of hostility in this country. There’s a tremendous amount of hostility in the United States,” Trump replied to the CNN host. “It’s anger. I mean, that’s an anger vote. People are angry about what’s happened. People are angry about the jobs.”
Maybe Scarborough’s next op-ed will touch on Trump’s quarter-century old comments on the man he needed more information about. Either way, the Washington Post has added a voice it hopes voters are interested in hearing.
“Joe is a dynamic addition to our roster of the best full-time columnists and bloggers in the business,” Washington Post editorial editor Fred Hiatt said in a statement. “He joins incisive writers like Danielle Allen, Barton Swaim, Michael Kinsley, Rachel Maddow, Carter Eskew and Ed Rogers, ensuring that our readers continue to have access to a wide variety of viewpoints on the presidential race.”