On Wednesday’s “Morning Joe,” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski tore into President Donald Trump’s “pathetic” response to a Tuesday question about whether he’s spoken to the families of coronavirus victims.
Brzezinski asked viewers to keep in mind the results of a recent poll that showed 57% of respondents felt Joe Biden cares about people such as themselves while only 39% would say that about Trump.
Then, she played a clip from Tuesday evening, showing a reporter asking Trump about speaking to victims’ families.
“I have many people. I know many stories,” he started, before veering off-topic multiple times: “I’ve spoken to three — maybe, I guess, four — families unrelated to me. I did. I lost a very good friend. I also lost three other friends, two of whom I didn’t know as well but they were friends and people I did business with and probably almost everybody in the room did. It’s a bad death. It’s not — it’s a bad thing. It grips onto some people.”
The president then oddly segued into talking about schools. “Now we found out that young people do extraordinarily well. That’s why I think we can start thinking about schools, but of course, we’re ending the school season, so, you know, it wouldn’t be — probably, you’d be back — you wouldn’t be back for too long. I noticed where Purdue University, a great school in a great state, wants to open and have students come in. I think that’s correct. Some colleges — I think I saw Harvard — wants to have students come back in the fall. I would hope that have… have students… I think the whole concept of computer learning is wonderful, but it’s not — tele… tele-learning — but it’s not the same thing as being in a classroom in a great college or a college of any kind. College, university, there’s nothing… you can’t replace that. So hopefully they’re going to be coming back. Young people do very well with this horrible scourge. They do very well. So, I am going to see you tomorrow.”
Trump pointed out a member of the audience who was “a star” before abruptly ending his remarks.
When the clip ended, Scarborough asked, “What was the question?”
“The question was about people who died and had you spoken to any,” sighed Brzezinski, “and he can’t do it. He just can’t do it. He’s uncomfortable or it’s impossible for him and I’m not sure which is worse, actually.”
She concluded, “That was pathetic.”
Coronavirus-related fatalities reached a grim milestone on Tuesday night, surpassing the American lives lost in the Vietnam War.