Morning Joe | Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion - Part 4
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Morning Joe Tag

One of our categories here at Legal Insurrection is "Trump Derangement Syndrome." Over at Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski provides a prime example of the malady. We noted yesterday how Mika was pushing poor Jon Meacham into drawing parallels between President Trump, the Nazis, and North Korea. Brzezinski ratcheted things up a notch this morning, suddenly blurting out that it "feels like a dictatorship developing." Joe Scarborough tried to talk his partner off the ledge, saying "that's an inside voice saying what you just said. You want to be like Greta. Greta pulls back before she says things like that."

On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski strongly suggested that President Trump is in cahoots with the Russians, saying "it's kind of hard not to think that [Trump] might be in on some sort of scheme." Earlier, Mika recycled the Trump/Nazi card. She invited Jon Meacham to draw a historical parallel to President Trump. When she asked him "what this is reminiscent of if you had to make a parallel," Meacham drew the comparison to President Nixon at the end of his tenure. That wasn't what Mika was looking for, so she tried again: "what is this reminiscent to, even outside of the United States?"

If Dems were smart, they'd watch and learn from the opening segment of today's Morning Joe. In his item of last night, Prof. Jacobson noted how Dems were taking the wrong lesson from the election, claiming that a close loss was a win. The message from Morning Joe was starkly different. As Mark Halperin put it this morning, this was an "unmitigated disaster" for the Dems. Joe Scarborough said that "all the chips were pushed to the middle of the table here. This was a winner take all and it was a huge win for Republicans and a big loss for Democrats."

Yes, let's all come together, hold hands, unite . . . and blame President Trump for the shooting of Steve Scalise and others yesterday. Morning Joe opened today with predictable pieties, Joe Scarborough saying, for example, that "the heated rhetoric in this country has to calm down." But before the show's first hour had ended, Mika Brzezinski turned the heat up to 11 by pointing the finger for the Scalise shooting in part at the president. An emotional Mika, after accusing President Trump of "promoting violence on the campaign trail," continued:
"I'm not putting anything squarely on the president, but I have to say that this is the new added dynamic to what is a very dangerous climate."

In the wake of the Kathy Griffin severed-head fiasco, and the Central Park play depicting the assassination of President Trump, you'd think that pundits might have the good sense to lay off metaphors invoking the violent death of the president. But today comes law prof Jonathan Turley with yet another sanguinary simile. Appearing on Morning Joe to discuss President Trump's executive order on travel, Turley suggested that President Trump's tweets on the subject are undermining his case. Then Turley went there: "it's like a presidential version of death by cop. Every time you seem to make advances, the president seems to stand up and say 'shoot me, shoot me.'"

We get it. Joe Scarborough doesn't approve of Donald Trump. Two weeks ago, we noted the Morning Joe host calling the president a "jackass." Things are escalating, and there appears to be no sense of decorum left on Morning Joe. This morning, Scarborough called Trump a "schmuck" - a term that literally means penis in Yiddish, and is used as a pejorative to express contempt for a person.

Two months ago, we reported on Morning Joe going "Crazy over Trump's Mental Health." The show was back on that beat today, with two variations on the theme. First, panel members were able to cite a Wall Street Journal editorial harshly criticizing President Trump for his tweeting habits, describing him as a person "with a propensity for self-destructive behavior [who] can’t seem to help" himself and who is his own "most effective opponent." That same Wall Street Journal editorial reports that a recent Trump Twitter burst came in response to a Morning Joe segment on the immigration executive order.

The battle between global elitism and nationalism was on display on today's Morning Joe. The panelists exposed their own elitism while Joe Scarborough declared that—at least within the Trump administration—nationalism, in the person of Steve Bannon, is winning. Scarborough reported that his sources tell him that Bannon has been leaking about Jared Kushner's Russia contacts in an effort to "sideline" Kushner and preserve his own place within the administration. A bit later, Joe proclaimed Bannon "President of the United States," given his influence over the actual president.

After today's Morning Joe played a montage various Trump administration members praising the president, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough savaged them as "robots" and "stooges" who sounded like people in countries like North Korea and Iran. Of course, President Obama didn't need people in his administration to praise him. He had the liberal media doing that for him, free of charge. Check out, courtesy of our friends at NewsBusters, this assemblage of the MSM drooling over Obama.

If, say, Greg Gutfield had held up a realistic-looking severed head of the previous president, do you think Morning Joe would have refused to cover the story? But on today's Morning Joe, when a panelist made reference to "the Kathy Griffin news," Mika Brzezinski put her foot down:

"We're not talking about it. I'm sorry, it's too gross. It's just not worth doing."

Today's Morning Joe aired a mock anti-Republican ad that its staff created. Scarborough said he told "the kids in the back that work for us" to "draw up an ad that will look like what we're going to see next year." As you'll see from the video clip, the ad is predictable campaign fare, focusing on the Republican health care bill. Pre-existing conditions coverage disintegrates. Medicaid is "slashed." And, of course, "huge tax cuts for the rich," with images of President Trump against a backdrop of yachts and mansions. The ad ends with the disclaimer: "not an actual ad, but probably will be."

On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough  said that President Trump "revealed himself as the jackass that leaked top secret Israeli intel,"  adding that the intel that President Trump allegedly leaked was "about somebody on the inside of a terror organization that killed 20 little girls and their mothers last night." Scarborough first observed that in denying that he had mentioned Israel in his meeting with the Russians, Trump was denying something of which he had not been accused. Scarborough said that was like a man who runs into a police station saying "my wife's missing and it's not my gun that's at the bottom of the pond in the back of our house by her body."

The MSM is hating President Trump's foreign trip. Why? Because it takes the spotlight off what they'd much rather be covering: the investigations back home into Russian involvement in the election. Yesterday, we witnessed a CNN host fretting that President Trump's successful speech in Saudi Arabia might be "normalizing" him. Now it's Mika Brzezinski's turn to insist that she won't let Morning Joe be distracted by the foreign trip. On today's show, when HuffPo's Sam Stein said that despite the investigations, people are "going about our business," Mika jumped on him.

Joe Scarborough has painted a no-win portrait of VP Pence. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough said that Vice-President Pence "is either a sucker and a dupe for Donald Trump . . . or he's a liar. There is no middle ground." Giving Pence the dubious benefit of the doubt, Scarborough advised, "if it is the first, I think it's about time for Mike Pence to go to Donald Trump and say, as I think most of us would, if you set me up to be your liar again, I'm walking."

What a difference a day makes. Yesterday, DC was deep in the throes of impeachment fever. Today, the collective political temperature has plummeted all because of deputy AG Rod Rosenstein's appointment of the highly-respected Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the investigation of possible Russian involvement in the presidential election. As a marker of just how dramatically the mood has changed, consider these statements about Rosenstein on today's Morning Joe. The Washington Post's David Ignatius said that Rosenstein "went from the seeming fall guy to the defender of our republic." Joe Scarborough seconded the notion: "it sounds melodramatic; it's not. Rod Rosenstein: defender of our republic, ensurer of our system of checks and balances." John Heilemann similarly credited Rosenstein with "saving the constitutional republic."

Joe Scarborough likes to make himself out to be a simple country lawyer. But on today's Morning Joe, he ran afoul of a cardinal lawyering rule: never ask a witness a question to which you don't know the answer. Scarborough laid out a lengthy timeline for the purpose of teeing up law professor Jonathan Turley to agree with Joe's conclusion that there was a prosecutable, federal case of obstruction of justice against President Trump. But Turley hit Joe between the eyes with his response:

"This isn't going to be real popular, but I don't think so . . . The fact is, I don't think this makes out an obstruction case."