Joe Scarborough Defies ‘Trump Suck-Ups’, Doubles Down On David Duke Comparison

On Monday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough compared President Donald Trump’s tweets to infamous Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. By Tuesday, the Morning Joe host was being criticized by the President’s defenders but Scarborough doubled down on his comments and called out his critics.

Scarborough was not impressed with one defense of Trump: that Transport Secretary Elaine Chao’s Asian heritage somehow meant he wasn’t racist.

“What? You can attack — you have one Asian-American woman of quote, color ,in your cabinet, so you can tell US citizens to go back to their countries because they’re black? It’s insanity. The Republicans, how shameful. Again, how shameful. I never ever imagined it would get this bad.”

“You know, I thought it was like 1949 or 1959 all of a sudden,” the Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson said.

“Look, we knew that Donald Trump was racist. I mean, that’s not a headline. That’s not breaking news, but this isn’t country club sort of not our sort of people racism. This is end of the bar at 1.00 am, go back to Africa kind of racism.”

“This is David Duke — I said it yesterday, Gene, I’ll say it today. This is David Duke racists,” Scarborough said.

“I know there were some Trump suck-ups yesterday that wrote things critical of me saying that.”

“All I said was, you lift David Duke’s words and Donald Trump’s words and I guarantee you can put them together, you can find Duke tweets or quotes that sound just like what Donald Trump has been saying in the past couple of days.”

“Absolutely. David Duke,” Robinson said. “Go back to George Wallace and Lester Maddox. This is bad, bad stuff. This is the President of the United States who made, I think, a wrong political calculation but made a political calculation to go flat out racist I guess to energize his base, his aging white base and draw that line.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.