MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” hosts shredded House Speaker Mike Johnson and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Friday for their “Orwellian” defenses of President Trump’s social media remarks that six Democratic lawmakers should be arrested and put on trial for “seditious behavior.”
The Democrat officials, all of whom are either military or intelligence community veterans, earned the president’s ire for participating in a Tuesday video urging American servicemen and women to remember their oath not to follow “illegal orders.” Among Trump’s posts on Truth Social about the video was a repost of a fellow user telling him to hang the targeted Democrats like “GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD.”
“See how easy this is for Donald Trump? Everybody’s talking about Epstein. Everybody’s talking about record-low poll numbers and all he has to do is go on Truth Social and just say, ‘Kill senators,’” “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough exasperatedly observed. “That is how easy it is for him. [He just has] to have somebody type it in, send it out [and] boom! You don’t hear about Epstein. You don’t hear about affordability.”
“We’ve seen this precise playbook before,” co-host Jonathan Lemire said, echoing Scarborough’s sentiments. “Remember when President Trump called for President Obama to be arrested on treason charges? That was the summer when the Epstein story blew up the first time. This is exactly the playbook to distract. ‘Let’s talk about something else. Anything else from what’s going on.’”
You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment yourself in the video below.
Citing Trump’s low polling numbers, “Morning Joe” co-anchor Willie Geist said, “He knows if he does this, if he says what he said and wrote what he wrote, that all of the people who support him on TV, on podcasts, online and in the halls of Congress will fall in line.” Geist also noted that both Leavitt and Johnson accused the Democrats in question of trying to encourage American troops to generally disobey orders, rather than just “illegal orders.”
“This is Orwellian. They’re literally saying just the opposite of what is true,” Scarborough said. “They’re lying to the American people. People on other news channels are lying to the American people. They are literally saying, ‘You have to uphold your oath.’ The White House is saying, ‘No, you don’t.’”
“These people are lying through their teeth. Mike Johnson knows that this is all about what military men and women need to do to uphold their sacred oath and that is not to commit illegal actions,” the “Morning Joe” host continued. “They know that, and yet they keep lying.” Scarborough then lamented, one final time, the effectiveness of Trump’s distraction strategy.
“We’re not talking about Donald Trump’s record-low approval ratings. We’re not talking about all of the stupid things that his Department of Justice has done just this past week,” Scarborough concluded. “He just snaps this out and everybody’s going to follow this for a day or two and stop talking about the things that, again, show how weakened the Republican Party’s position is right now.”
