Joe Scarborough lashed out at conservatives who want Americans to stop self-isolating and return to work amid the ongoing coronovirus pandemic, accusing them of being “ready to euthanize” the elderly.
“Right now, these conservatives are making Democrats who are pro-choice actually look more pro-life because they’re only worried about the unborn,” he said on his MSNBC morning show Thursday. “It is the born — it is the weakest among us, it is senior citizens — who they’re ready to euthanize because they want Boeing’s corporate earnings to not dip too low.”
Scarborough referred to an article in the New York Times that said a lawyer close to President Donald Trump advised him to get the country back to work in spite of the ongoing pandemic because, well, old people die anyway.
In a Tuesday town hall on Fox News, Trump pushed to reopen the country’s businesses and get people out of their homes. He said he hopes to see America “opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” which is April 12. That message has been echoed by some conservative politicians and media figures.
On Thursday, Fox News host Brit Hume said it is “entirely reasonable” that elderly Americans could be fine with dying amid the coronavirus outbreak to save the U.S. economy.
Hume was defending comments made by Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick on Tucker Carlson’s program the night before, where the 69-year-old official said, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
Watch Scarborough share the latest stats and criticize Trump’s response above.