Morning Joe Mocks Cruz and Rubio Over Trump Guilty Verdict: ‘Competitive Sycophancy at Olympic Levels’
Republicans rushed to the defense of former President Donald Trump after a jury convicted him of all 34 charges in his hush money case — and MSNBC’s Morning Joe took them to school for it.
The unanimous verdict was delivered on Thursday evening, and it did not take long for Trump’s allies to take to the media to express their dissatisfaction. However, the unpatriotic language they used — and their blatant fealty to Trump — was what the co-hosts and panelists on Morning Joe ripped apart on Friday:
Mike Barnicle: Donald J. Trump’s reaction to the guilty verdict was, once again, he’s already demeaned and destroyed much of our electoral process by saying it’s rigged and corrupt. And now he took on the rule of law. He took on the definition of justice itself by saying this verdict was corrupt and it was rigged, and it’s a rigged system. Well, if he was correct in both his assertions that the electoral process is rigged and corrupt, and that the judicial process is rigged and corrupt, then there is no more America. There is no more America. And Lisa, I’m wondering if you, as an officer of the court, worry about the fact that Trump and his followers — we’ve seen [Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)], we’ve seen [Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)] — are going to continue to do damage to the rule of law.
Lisa Rubin: Absolutely. That’s a huge concern of mine. I couldn’t believe Ted Cruz’s statement last night about the verdict that this was an outrage and an upset to the rule of law. And I kept thinking, you were involved in this. He kept dragging your father into this. He had David Pecker do mockups of your father with Lee Harvey Oswald. And yet you’re defending this guy. The competitive sycophancy going on here is Olympic level. And what’s going to suffer? Our democracy and justice, which should be the twin pillars of our country. Right? And yet they are all falling all over themselves to say this is not how the justice system should function. This is exactly how the justice system should function.
Co-host Joe Scarborough saw right through Rubio, who is widely believed to be a contender for Trump’s running mate:
Scarborough: Yeah, I mean, speaking of grotesque, if a guy whose family escaped [Fidel Castro’s] Cuba, communist Cuba, a country that Castro ran with an iron fist, there was no rule of law there. There were just, there was just repression. There was tyranny.
Mika Brzezinski: What an insult.
Scarborough: And Marco, like these other people, all because they want to cozy up to Donald Trump and maybe be his vice president.
Brzezinski: That’s it.
Scarborough: They degrade themselves and they slander America. They hate on America, Katty Kay, talking about how, you know, Rubio said in the E. Jean Carroll case, a jury of Trump’s peers were, quote, “a joke” because he didn’t like the outcome. And now he’s comparing America to Castro’s Cuba. Which I will say, yes, it’s meant to kiss up to Donald Trump and shock everybody else, doesn’t shock me. All it’s going to do is hurt Republicans. It’s going to hurt them in Wisconsin. It’s going to hurt them in Michigan. It’s going to hurt them in Pennsylvania. Americans know that Marco Rubio’s lying. Americans know that we are a nation of laws. Americans know that these jurors and jurors do a noble job. And so you have you have these people going out there saying these outrageous things. And at the end of the day, yes, it hurts to see people hate America. It hurts me as a patriot to hear people hating on America. But I do know at the end of the day, it’s only going to end up hurting Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party anymore because people don’t buy their propaganda.
Watch the video above via MSNBC.
