“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough got blunt on Tuesday morning, marveling disgustedly at how deeply “anti-American sentiment” seems to run in today’s mainstream Republican party.
Scarborough’s thoughts came in response to Liz Cheney losing her congressional seat, in large part because she was so outspoken against Donald Trump. In her concession speech, Cheney reminded her supporters that she was fully aware of the political risk she took for her career by not supporting Trump and his 2020 election lies, but that she simply couldn’t compromise herself to do so.
“No house seat, no office in this land, is more important than the principles we’ve all sworn to protect,” she said.
Elsewhere in her speech, Cheney offered harsh criticisms for continued Trump supporters, and worried for the party as a whole. And to that, Scarborough readily agreed.
“If somebody listening to that speech – and listen to those words – thinks that Liz Cheney is being melodramatic, well, they aren’t having the conversations I’m having with friends and family members and people who used to be in Liz Cheney’s party and mine. Or, actually, people who are still in Liz Cheney’s party but used to be in my party,” he said.
To illustrate “the depths to which this anti-American sentiment is running in the Republican Party,” Scarborough recalled two separate conversations he had on Monday about the current state of U.S. government. According to the host, one of those conversations happened with “a Washington fixture since the days of Ronald Reagan,” who had previously “expressed concerns about some of Donald Trump’s extremities.”
“He said, ‘Joe, we can replace the U.S. government. It’s not about the U.S. government. It’s about individuals.’ So here’s a guy who’s saying that we can throw away Madisonian democracy,” Scarborough reflected. “We can throw away checks and balances, we can throw away the Bill of Rights, we can throw away the Constitution, we can just get rid of a government that has fed and freed more people throughout history, that’s liberated more people throughout history, that’s keeping the flames of freedom alive right now in Ukraine and in Central Europe than any other country on the planet. And we can replace the US government. That is the depths to which this cancer has spread among mainstream Republicans.”
You can watch the full discussion from “Morning Joe” in the video above.
