“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough pushed back against Senate Republicans’ new campaign to publicly fund President Trump’s paused White House ballroom after the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner this past weekend, calling Republicans’ argument “a false choice.”
“This is preposterous,” Scarborough said Tuesday. “They’re saying, ‘We need this ballroom because things have gotten so dangerous out there.’ They have. I’ve expressed concerns. [Co-host] Mika [Brzezinski] and I have said time and time again, it’s preposterous and they can never again have so many cabinet members … in one place that is not as secured as the United States Capitol.”
Scarborough’s comments come in the wake of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s new push to get Congress to pass legislation granting $400 million of taxpayer funding to pay for Trump’s ballroom. Scarborough not only mocked the ballroom by calling it the “Marie Antoinette ballroom” multiple times Tuesday, but he also argued that the solution to the events at this year’s WHCA dinner is finding new, more secure locations for such festivities.
“I’m not going to go into the details of all the things that Iran could have done [this past weekend],” Scarborough explained. “It doesn’t take an imagination to figure that out, but it would have been very easy to do. So they cannot go back to the Hilton. It is a national security risk. That said, building the Marie Antoinette ballroom is not the reaction to that [for] keeping things more secure. You have to find better locations.”
You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment yourself below.
“How do you sit back and talk about security when The Washington Post is reporting that they actually had less security at this dinner by choice, by the White House’s choice, than they should have had,” Scarborough added, before referencing the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, PA. “We’re at a stage now where the stakes are so much higher, especially after all of the blunders in Butler, PA, which I must say still baffle me.”
“All of these Republicans blindly following the talking points the White House put out right after the shooting is really a bit insulting,” the “Morning Joe” host continued. “Yes, we need the president safe. We need the president secure. That does not mean we need to blindly throw taxpayer money at this time at one of the president’s pet projects.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Jonathan Lemire, meanwhile, noted that an event like the WHCA dinner would never be held in Trump’s ballroom.
“Even if the ballroom existed now, the White House Correspondents’ dinner would not be there,” Lemire said. “It is not a White House event. It’s a different organization.” Later, Scarborough again dismantled the logic of Graham and co.’s argument for their ballroom funding campaign.
“This Republican idea that somehow Donald Trump is going to be like a king, they’re going to build a ballroom and he will be forever secure, is just nonsense,” Scarborough concluded. “It is a false choice.”
