After his on-air rant earlier this month, Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough is back to criticizing Donald Trump and the Republican party over recent cabinet picks.
On Tuesday’s (December 17) Morning Joe, Scarborough took aim at Trump’s controversial cabinet picks and how his pressure tactics are “backfiring.”
His comments come after Trump gave a press conference on Monday (December 16), where he seemed to soften his stance on pressuring senators to push through his cabinet picks. Trump said he would call for primary challenges to Republican senators who voted against his nominees for “stupid reasons” but would show restraint on those voting for “reasonable” reasons.
“Boy, yesterday we were talking about the back-and-forth, a lot of the Republican senators saying, ‘Hey, you know what? The pressure campaign, not really going to work, in fact, it may be backfiring,’” Scarborough said, per RawStory.com.
“The press conference, very interesting,” he continued. “[Trump] said, ‘If they’re unreasonable and personal, I could see them being primaried. If they’re reasonable, and they don’t like their views or something like that, I could see that.’”
This comes after Republican senators blocked Trump’s nominee, Matt Gaetz, as attorney general last month. Scarborough believes a similar fate could be heading for Trump’s defense nominee, Pete Hegseth, and intelligence nominee, Tulsi Gabbard.
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“We first of all remember Gaetz going down, people around Trump saying, ‘Wow, we traded up with Pam Bondi — we got a better deal out of it,” Scarborough continued. “Just the facts that Hegseth, there’s still the feeling he is not going to make it through.”
Scarborough went on to say that Trump “does want Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” as part of his cabinet but that it appears he is willing to let Hegseth and Gabbard fall by the wayside.
“I’m not so sure that wasn’t just a tip to the Senate going, ‘If you have good reasons to not take those two, we understand,’” Scarborough concluded.
Previously, on the December 5 edition of the MSNBC talk show, Scarborough went on a 20-minute rant at his critics, including Atlantic writer David Frum and those who criticized his and Mika Brzezinski‘s meeting with President-elect Trump following his election win.
Frum and other critics said Scarborough and Morning Joe were operating on “fear” and trying to “appease” the incoming administration.
Elsewhere on Tuesday’s show, Scarborough laughed at Trump’s vow to file more lawsuits against the press, including CBS News, journalist Bob Woodward, and the people of Iowa, for the Ann Seltzer poll, which incorrectly predicted the election result.
Scarborough openly laughed at the idea and said all those cases “would be thrown out.” Speaking on the ABC defamation suit that was settled over the weekend, Scarborough noted that was likely ABC just wanting to put it behind them and move on.
“But does that mean that Ann Seltzer’s going to have to worry about? No. Does that mean The New York Times? No. Does that mean Bob Woodward and Simon & Schuster gonna… No,” he continued. “I mean, you go down the list and all of those are going to be thrown out like that.”
“So you can make you can make the threats all you want… But at the end of the day, we still have a pretty, pretty strong First Amendment. And that ain’t going to change in the next six month,” he added.
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