Joe Scarborough: Trump Is ‘Talking the Way Fascists Talk’ and Media Should Say It

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough warned about President Donald Trump’s ‘fascist instincts’ on Wednesday and seemed to wonder if American institutions could survive a second Trump term. The Morning Joe host, who is also a former Republican congressman, also suggested the media needed to do better calling it out.

“But the question is, how long do the institutions hold up if Donald Trump is re-elected?” Scarborough asked.

“That’s really the question here. Again, the federal judiciary has done a pretty exemplary job of holding Donald Trump’s worst instincts in check. The press, the investigative corps of the press, they’ve done an exemplary job in many ways as well. But where he breaks through these norms and where polite society is not allowed to say, this is — he’s talking the way fascists talk — that’s where there is a concern.”

“And I will say, again, I have long had faith in the institutions of this country to hold Donald Trump in check. I believe the institutions of this country have done a good job, for the most part, other than the spineless Congress, the spineless United States Senate, of holding this man in check and his worst autocratic, fascist instincts.”

“I think, though, Masha Gessen has said, what Anne Applebaum has said, what Jay Rosen has underlined at NYU, is the fact that we haven’t been as good in the media of moving beyond our current political lexicon, the political lexicon, the language, the boundaries of debate that we’ve used over the past 240 years because we’ve never had a president that’s spoken like this,” Scarborough said.

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.