MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough ripped the Trump administration’s “celebration of stupidity” as the coronavirus spreads inside the White House.
At least three individuals who work in the West Wing have tested positive for the virus, and the “Morning Joe” host was astonished that President Donald Trump still insisted on going without a mask and ignoring social distancing guidelines.
“The president is worried about the optics,” Scarborough said. “The pandemic doesn’t care about the optics. The president also — you talk about the death of expertise, this is just the sell celebration of stupidity, when the president of the United States talks about the vice president’s press person getting COVID-19, and then saying, ‘See, I told you tests don’t matter, even with all these tests, she still got it.’ I mean, one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.”
“If they weren’t taking tests inside the White House, we’d probably find out next week that, well, you know, probably a huge number of people inside the White House got it,” Scarborough added. “Instead, there was testing — obviously, tracing, isolation, treatment — the sort of things that Dr. [Anthony] Fauci says we want to have nationwide, but we don’t because of Donald Trump’s failures. Now the president himself, somehow, talking about this strict regimen inside the White House, that found somebody immediately and sent them home. The strict regimen inside the White House somehow being a failure, proving we don’t need testing nationwide. Explain that for me, if you will.”
Scarborough didn’t understand why congressional Republicans continued to watch the president bungle the response as their Senate majority swirled down the drain.
“This is a crisis,” he said. “Yeah, again, we’re not talking about Robert Mueller. If you’re fine with obstruction of justice from a president, good on ya — you’ll pay for it at the polls. You already have in ’18, you’ll pay at the polls in ’20, as well. That’s fine. If you’re fine with what the president did with the Ukraine call, good on ya. You’re the one that’s going to pay at the polls in ’20, just like so many Republicans paid.”
“But we’re talking, in this case, this is a pandemic, the worst health care crisis in a century,” Scarborough continued. “This is the worst national crisis we’ve faced since World War II. You’re sitting on your hands while the president of the United States continues to act recklessly from the beginning.”
The death toll has passed 80,000, and the administration seemed no more prepared to handle the crisis than they were four months ago.
“His magical thinking continued with drugs that now we find out are unsafe,” Scarborough said. “He was shoving those drugs on the American people, shoving those drugs on people in his administration, shoving those drugs on patients at VA system. The magical thinking continued with injecting disinfectants into bodies, trying to get his body doctors to seriously look at that, as well as shoving lights into people. Republicans, you know this is not right. You know he is not well.”