The ‘Morning Joe’ team is calling out President Donald Trump’s close advisers for allowing him to post a taunting statement about the killing of Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife.
Reiner, 78, and his wife, Michelle, 70, were killed in a horror knife attack at their home over the weekend, with their 32-year-old son, Nick, now in custody as a suspect.
Reacting just hours after news of their disturbing deaths broke, Trump suggested that Reiner was killed partly due to his “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” He signed off the Truth Social post with a glib “rest in peace.” The post, and his subsequent doubling down, have sparked widespread backlash.
Joe Scarborough reacted on MS NOW on Tuesday, questioning how Trump, 79, was able to go so far. “Where was Susie Wiles? Where was any grown-up in the White House? Where were they? Where were they?” the eponymous host asked.
“They had to know that even for this president, who aggressively goes after his critics, who’s broken barriers time and time again, but even for this president with the low standards that he’s allowed to get by on, somebody in that White House had to know this would cause conservatives, this would cause his most fierce supporters in the MAGA base, to be deeply disturbed at how much it would damage him.”
He added: “This is not about hurting libs. This isn’t about libs. This is about Donald Trump hurting Donald Trump, Donald Trump hurting the White House, Donald Trump hurting the MAGA base.”
Co-host Jonathan Lemire agreed. “There’s no one in the White House to tell him and that’s by design,” he said.
“[The] social media account is the president himself or Dan Scavino, who’s one of his longtime advisers. They’re the ones who have the keys to this. But someone in the White House response staff, they put it out. The reflection, the reflexive instinct, is just to fight, to double down on whatever the president says. This should not be a challenging moment,” Lemire said.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski said the vile Truth Social post and subsequent refusal from Trump to walk it back marks a stark difference between his first and second administrations.
“When the president doubled down on this, with his words, there seemed to be a shift from maybe his first presidency. Sometimes he would say things that are a little bit off, but there’d be kind of a twinkle or a like a sort of ‘I’m joking, but I’m not.’ And there was something different here, like a change. And I don’t know what it is. Who in the White House was supposed to be there to stop him?”
“Maybe they can’t?” she added.
“They can’t, or they don’t want to,” co-host Willie Geist added, continuing: “They like being close to power, and they’re just enabling it. And they know there’s nothing they can say to him that will stop him at this point.”
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