A portion of the first Morning Jolt of the week:
Caution: Some TV Host Position Shifts on Trump Can Cause Whiplash
Joe Scarborough, April 1:
Even after the passing of Antonin Scalia and the Paris and San Bernadino, Calif., attacks, many right-leaning pundits are spending their days scolding readers and declaring that no true conservative or God-fearing Christian could support Donald Trump. This simmering rage has now risen to such a level that many conservative opinion shapers are spending their waking hours coping with a festering Zapruder-like obsession over video frames of the Corey Lewandowski-Michelle Fields confrontation while obsessing over the GOP front-runner’s latest embarrassing gaffe…
Not to be outdone, in the latest issue of National Review, James Kirchick wrote that what was most significant about Trump’s rise was that “he has mainstreamed white racial grievance to a point unprecedented in post-Civil Rights Era America. That it has taken this most improbable of figures — a thrice-married, multimillionaire New York real-estate magnate and celebrity television star with an Orthodox Jewish daughter — to achieve what no hooded Klansman or backwoods neo-Nazi could ever have hoped of doing makes his feat all the more astonishing.”
Actually, what is most astonishing is the rising level of rage among Trump’s political enemies from inside the Republican establishment. Many of my conservative friends are sounding as arrogant and unmoored as left-wing pundits let loose on MSNBC during the Bush years.
Joe Scarborough, this morning:
The [Republicans] can’t be morally outraged this week when they knew what [Trump was doing last week. By the way, I said it here on the TV box. And you can check it out on the TV box. I said, all the way back in December, I would never endorse Donald Trump, so long as he supported banning 1.4 million people [sic] from entering the last best hope for a dying world, the United States of America, simply because of the God they worship, simply because they were Muslim. That has been out on the table while every Republican has endorsed this man! And I have said, and I have stuck to it, I will never endorse Donald Trump so long as he supports a Muslim ban. I’ve said it clear.
Now, listen, I predicted, and Mika predicted, that the guy was going to win the nomination. This pissed a lot of people off, because we were right and they were wrong. They said ‘oh, you must be supporting him.’ No, I’ve always been clear. I said I would never support a man. I said what he said about David Duke was disqualifying – wrote it in the Washington Post! So these Republicans who this week were so shocked and stunned and deeply saddened and so offended by this clear act of racism, had all the evidence in the world before.
How do you endorse, Paul Ryan, a man that supports the banning of 1.4 billion from ever entering the United States of America? You make him back down! That’s I was hoping, we could put pressure on him to back down and change that policy! Instead, Al, he’s doubled down. Now it’s people that may have, what is it, one-sixteenth Mexican blood? If you have one-sixteenth Mexican blood maybe you can’t be a judge? One-sixteenth Muslim blood? This is unbelievable! He is getting worse, not better!
Gee, it’s almost as if Scarborough is coming around to Jamie Kirchick’s assessment, one he called “arrogant and unmoored” two months ago. It’s a good thing Scarborough isn’t “spending his days scolding people and declaring that no true conservative or God-fearing Christian could support Donald Trump”, huh?