Ron DeSantis may now officially be running against Donald Trump, but in the days since announcing his presidential candidacy, the Florida governor has aligned himself with the former president on at least one issue: January 6 pardons. And on Friday morning’s episode of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough went off about it.
Appearing on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” on Thursday, DeSantis was asked directly about potentially pardoning people who were part of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. In response, he said “On day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who people are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive in issuing pardons.”
“I mean, he’s not really that stupid,” Scarborough said on Friday morning. “Maybe he’s talking like a third grader? We’re talking about people who tried to overthrow American democracy, and Ron knows that. He knows that. And yet, he’s playing that game?”
Scarborough then pulled up a clip of Trump’s similar response to a question about pardoning January 6 rioters, before visibly getting angry at both Republican candidates.
“It’s unbelievable. Law and order? The party of law and order? That’s what they always tell us,” Scarborough said. “Is it law and order for the poor? Is it law and order for the dispossessed? Is it law and order for what, everybody but rioters who tried to overthrow the federal government to keep a Republican in the White House after he’d lost?”
Scarborough also warned that neither Trump nor DeSantis will win swing-voters with this promise.
“Let me tell you something. The rotted corpse of what once was the Republican party, it just keeps lurching forward, zombie-like, and it will follow Donald Trump into whatever gutter he takes them on this 8-year march toward fascism,” he said. “Not almost-fascism, not something quite like fascism, but fascism itself!”
You can watch the full moment in the video above.