The co-hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” kicked off Wednesday morning by hammering former president Donald Trump and former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo over comments they made praising Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After sharing a clip of a smiling and effusive Pompeo heaping praise in the Russian strongman, a grim-faced Joe Scarborough expressed his disgust.
“We are so far from having a Republican Party or having conservatives that come out of the lineage of Ronald Reagan or Jeane Kirkpatrick, or conservatives out of the mode of Margaret Thatcher,” he began before quoting Pompeo saying of Putin, “He has ‘enormous respect and says he is elegantly sophisticated, a counterpart’.”
“He’s talking about a man now who has threatened nuclear extinction on NATO, on the United States, the world, if he is not allowed to invade yet again for the third time over the past 13, 14 years,” the Morning Joe host elaborated. “He says, ‘elegantly sophisticated’ and said there’s not much gain in him assassinating journalists, not much gain in him assassinating political opponents, that it lights up the human rights light and makes it hard for them to work together.”
“It was as pro-Putin has you could be, but this is happening all over the place,” he continued. “This is happening on Fox News; you have people on Fox News who are openly running down Ukraine, a country that’s striving to move toward the west and move toward democracy. You see it happening with the Republicans in the House. You see it happening, of course, with Donald Trump, who just, you know, we had people asking, ‘what would Donald Trump do if we had this crisis? Oh, Donald Trump would never put up with this.'”
“Donald Trump is actually saluting Vladimir Putin for invading a sovereign power, it doesn’t stop,” he added.
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