Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough gleefully shredded Vice President JD Vance for railing against shutdown brinkmanship, after having loudly and proudly endorsed the same tactic just a year ago.
Vance, speaking on Monday after weekend talks between President Donald Trump and congressional leaders collapsed, blamed Democrats for what now looks like an inevitable closure of federal offices.
“I think we’re headed to a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing,” he moaned, teeing up Scarborough nicely to deliver a bit that laid bare Vance’s apparent hypocrisy.
His comments contradict his own rant outside the White House after his MAGA collective failed to broker a deal with Democratic Congressional leaders.
“We have disagreements about tax policy, but you don’t shut that government down. We have disagreements about healthcare policy, but you don’t shut the government down,” Vance insisted. “You don’t use your policy disagreements as leverage to not pay our troops, to not have essential services of government actually function.”
Morning Joe producers played a clip of his rant, and Scarborough couldn’t resist going in on Vance. “So. I’m easily confused, as everybody knows,” he began.
“I mean, he was the guy who said that Donald Trump might be America’s Hitler. And then he changed. He’s a guy that said, God expects more from us than to vote for Donald Trump. JD did. And then he changed. And Mika, didn’t he say like, not so long ago, that this is exactly when you use your leverage to try to get the other party to change when the other party’s in the White… Didn’t he say, I don’t know, am I dreaming? Is this like, is this like a dream from Dallas where it’s the next season? I don’t know.”
Scarborough’s “dream from Dallas” quip referred to the infamous TV twist in the 1980s soap, when an entire season was revealed to have been just a dream. “Let’s take a look,” co-host Mika Brzezinski offered.
A clip promptly rolled, showing Vance on the Shawn Ryan Show in September 2024. “Yeah, man. Why, why, why shouldn’t we be trying to force this government shutdown fight to get something out of it that’s good for the American people? Like, why have a government if it’s not a functioning government?” Vance asked then.
“What a shock,” Scarborough deadpanned. “That’s just one year ago. Oh, I thought that might be a decade ago!”
Scarborough, who was a congressman from Florida from 1995 until 2001, then turned to history. “When the government shut down, they’re gonna blame Republicans,” he warned. “Bill Clinton broke us, politically got reelected. It worked in his favor when there was a shutdown.”
He was pointing to the 1995–96 shutdowns, when House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republican caucus squared off against Clinton over the budget.
The standoff helped Clinton cast the GOP as extremists and boosted him to reelection. Scarborough also cited the 2013 shutdown under Barack Obama, triggered by Republican efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act, which again ended with the GOP carrying most of the blame.
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