In an episode this Monday of the MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” co-host Joe Scarborough condemned recent rhetoric from former President Donald Trump, who remains on track to secure the GOP’s presidential nomination for the 2024 election. In a recent campaign speech, with the first nominating contest in the GOP race set for this very month, Trump referred to the U.S. as “failing.”
“No. You’re a failure as a politician and a failure in so many other ways,” Scarborough said, addressing Trump directly and then adding: “Here’s a guy that, again, he’s talking about January 6 being peaceful — nothing peaceful about it. Calling the rioters ‘peaceful protesters’ — they go in, and they beat the hell out of cops — because I guess he just doesn’t give a damn about police officers. He makes fun of prisoners of war while he and his daddy figure out a way for him to stay home from the war because of bone spurs.”
Antagonism towards the direction the U.S. has taken, specifically while he’s been out of office, has been a consistent feature of Trump’s rhetoric and the comments from a range of figures on the Right.
They take the dispute well beyond politics, claiming, for instance, that an invasion is unfolding at the southern border as asylum-seekers and others arrive, which does not accurately reflect the actual situation. The border is not “open” in any reasonable sense of the idea, despite specific GOP claims otherwise. Even the frequently GOP-cited statistic of the rate of “encounters” by border enforcement personnel with evidently unauthorized individuals doesn’t reflect the full reality, because the number of “encounters” is distinct from numbers of individuals at the border either taken into custody or making it into the U.S.
Trump also insults American cities time and again, focusing on hatred. In a screed on Truth Social on the occasion of early proceedings in his January 6-related criminal case from Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump described Washington, D.C., as “FILTHY, DIRTY, FALLING APART, & VERY UNSAFE.”
