‘They’re All Grifters’: Morning Joe Compares GOP Lawmakers to Notorious 1980s Televangelists

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough compared Republican lawmakers to televangelists fleecing their flock.

The “Morning Joe” host reacted to video of Dr. Anthony Fauci calling out Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) for leveraging his attacks, which the doctor claims directly inspired death threats, to raise campaign money on his website.

“They’re all grifters,” Scarborough said.

Co-host Mika Brzezinski was outraged by the constant attacks on Fauci by conservatives, calling them “sick.”

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“We’re trying to get through a pandemic, and you have these idiots, these blowhards, who make it some sort of conspiracy theory party for themselves,” Brzezinski said. “It’s hard to watch. It must be very hard to be Dr. Fauci.”

Scarborough said they were merely cynical and using their attacks to keep their fans distracted while they picked their pockets.

“It comes down, at the end of the day, to people just being grifters,” Scarborough said. “We’re getting more and more evidence of that. more and more text messages are leaking, and people say one thing on television and say something else off television on Jan. 6 or as it pertains to this. You look at the fact that people are using this to raise money, they’re using this to get votes, they’re using this to get eyes, you know, more eyeballs on their prime-time cable news shows.”

“But you look at the election, the ‘Stop the Steal,’ it’s a $1 million industry,” he continued. “There’s a great Washington Post article last week talking about how they’ve all turned against each other in the ‘Stop the Steal’ community. You know, they’ve only got a limited market share, and everybody is tearing in to try to get the money. I talked about the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker last week. All of this we’ve seen in the anyone of age of Trump, it’s all, at the end of the day, including Donald Trump, who lived his life as a moderate Democrat but realized he could grift off the Republican Party for votes and money, it’s all a PTL Club scheme.”

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“It’s remarkable that you have the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakke show that has been shifted over to American government, and it’s been used to grift people,” he added. “Rand Paul knows better, he certainly — they all know better.”