MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough called for unity and bipartisanship, and in the same conversation, stated that he believes the Trump-era Republican Party doesn’t “deserve to survive.”
“I want the party to die,” Scarborough told hosts Saagar Enjeti and Marshall Kosloff on the Realignment podcast.
Scarborough, who is promoting his new book on Harry Truman and the future of the Republican party, simultaneously claimed he is “a small-government conservative,” but that the current GOP “has no future” and needs to be “destroyed.”
“Donald Trump is a racist. He’s a bigot, he’s fascist and my Republican friends and I can still call them friends. I can have friends that I disagree with politically, but my Republican friends that I used to work with have remained silent through the racism, through the fascism, through the breaching of constitutional norms,” Scarborough said. “I hope they go the way the Whig party. And I, I don’t think they deserve anything more than a complete and total collapse.”
Kosloff pointed out that the former Republican congressman preached unity and politicians working across the aisle earlier in the episode, but was now calling the GOP racist and fascist. Scarborough, however, saw no flaws in his logic.
“You got to make that calculation and get [51 votes] any way you can, but I guess because I am a Republican, I was a Republican, I guess I hold my own side to a higher level. And what this Republican party has proven is what I spent my entire life, trying to disprove, that Republicans weren’t racists, that Republicans, weren’t hard-hearted when it came to taking care of poor people. That Republicans weren’t anti-immigrant and all of these things,” he said.
“This Republican party under Donald Trump, they’ve actually proven that every horrible thing that liberals have said about the Republican Party over the past 25 years are true,” he continued.
Scarborough extended his contradictory statements and criticism of the current GOP, claiming that they have “remained silent” for too long about Trump.
“How do you sit down, how do you find a middle ground with a political party that is trying to throw out 150 million votes and disregard an election?” he asked. “They are either anti-democracy or they are post-democracy. I don’t know what you call it, but they don’t deserve to survive.”
“The Republican party has proven over the past four years, and especially in the past four weeks that they have moved to an anti-democracy, a post-democracy party. There can be no compromise for that. I can compromise with Bernie Sanders all f***ing day,” he continued.
While Scarborough claims he is currently a Republican, he has a track record of lauding Democrat politicians and demonizing the GOP.
In October, he proposed nominating Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court if the Democrats won the election.
“What a great birthday gift it will be next year for @HillaryClinton when she is one of the three new Supreme Court justices appointed through the Judiciary Reform Act of 2021,” Scarborough tweeted shortly after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s historic confirmation.
He also scoffed at Wisconsin Republicans when spring election results revealed liberal Judge Jill Karofsky unseated conservative Justice Daniel Kelly on the state Supreme Court.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Scarborough said between laughs. “You know, in the immortal words of Forrest Gump, ‘Stupid is as stupid does,’ and in this case, stupid, that would be the Wisconsin Republican Party, forced people to go out and vote in the middle of a pandemic believing that it would lower turnout and would elect a Republican so they could purge voter rolls.”
