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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:07]
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Welcome to the board podcast. I am Sam Stein, filling in for Tim while he is on vacation. Now, there are two programming reminders before we jump in, so some of this week and next week's show may actually come out later than normal. We have guest hosts like myself, different schedules than Tim's. Please accommodate us. Please, please be patient with us. Really appreciate that. And then this will be dark both this Friday and next Friday, so show will be your weekend pods. Save them, savor them, dribble them out through the weekend if you want. If that's how you prefer to, you know, have your podcast. With that out of the way, I have got a great guest for you today. He is the co host of Morning Joe every morning from 6 to 9 Eastern on Ms. Now, I still have trouble saying that he's a former Republican member of Congress. I don't know if he's ever mentioned that before. He's a fellow lover of the Boston Red Sox somehow managing to win 14 in a row. As of now, he is my good friend and all around mensch. It's Joe Scarborough.
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A
Joe, Sam, thank you so much for having me. I greatly appreciate it.
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B
Look, for 17 years now, I've been wanting to host with you as the guest and I finally get my moment. And this is like a real. Like I'm having trouble grappling with the power I possess right here.
- [01:26]
A
I love it. I do have to ask you before we start, though. Over your left shoulder appears to be a picture of George W. Bush. I can't read the writing. Please tell me that it says, now watch me hit this drive.
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B
Now watch this drive.
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A
Is that what it says?
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B
Yeah. A classic moment.
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A
I got to get those for my kids because my youngest son, Jack just learned how to hit. And every time he hits, he'll be talking and he gets up, there he goes, now watch me hit this ball.
- [01:51]
B
Oh, my God. Yeah. No, it's. It's a running joke among the friends and then we usually shank it. So that's the problem, of course. So look, it's funny. I was thinking about this show with you and my mind drifted back actually to the early Morning Joe days when I don't know if people remember this, but you used to do, if I'm remembering correctly, used to do a radio program like the hour after. So you would do the six to nine and then you get off and you do a radio program. And I remember those days. And I remember you come up to the D.C. bureau a lot and you would just kind of scuttle off the set and do the radio program. And back in those days, in the D.C. bureau, back when it was in the Nebraska Avenue studios, one of the guests was always Pappy Cannon. And people, you know Pat, I think you and I both have like this affinity for Pat. He was an exceptionally nice guy, obviously some controversial views. But I remember this conversation we had right before radio program months, and I'm going to set this up. You were trying to talk him out of doing a book. Do you remember this? I remember.
- [02:53]
A
I do remember it. I tried to talk him out of doing a book that basically, I think it was like called the End of Whitey's World or something like that. His brother in law offered to pay him a lot of money not to put the book out. His publisher tried to get him not to put the book out. And he put the book out. And then, I mean, shock of old shocks. There was great blowback on it. And you know, for people that know Pat and that worked with Pat, and this goes all the way back into the 1970s, 1980s, they will tell you that that Pat was an extraordinarily nice man. He was kind to everybody. But he like Donald Trump, like, you know, many other people in this Trump movement, they, they were kind of stuck in 1954. For them, that was America. And there were so many things with Pat that I agreed with. But on immigration and on a lot of these other issues, this nationalism and this, you know, I think he too, like a certain historian that was on Tucker show, tried to blame, may have tried to blame Churchill for World War II. So there is a connection between Buchananism and Trumpism. And I would say that as people kind of grapple with where Trump, Donald Trump came from, I think you, you look at Pat Buchanan's campaigns in 92 and 96, along with Ross Perot's campaigns in 92 and 96. And that really, that really has brought us to where we are today, along with my former party, the Republican Party and some of its worst instincts.
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B
Yeah. The reason I was bringing up Pat is because. So the chapter was called the End of White America. He did get let go from MSNBC at the time after the book came out. And, and I'm thinking about this now and it's like some of the stuff Pat wrote about in that book, in that chapter specifically, it's like you, you would get that from a, an everyday Stephen Miller tweet. Right. Like that, that is what. That's now become sort of the accepted doctrine.
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A
Yeah.
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Of the Republican Party, especially on immigration. And I Guess I don't know. How do we get here? Like how did your ex party get here?
- [05:21]
A
Well, I got here by Donald making it acceptable. You know, it's so incredible when you look at what people get away with saying in Congress every single day. Now I remember Steve King out of Iowa said something that was, I don't even remember exactly what it was, but it was nowhere as shocking as a lot of things that we're hearing said today. And I remember the party just decided we're going to kick King off the committees, we're not going to fund him and we are going to drive him from Congress. And so they did successfully drive Steve King from Congress because that wasn't the idea of what they wanted the Republican Party to be. Donald Trump came along and you know, in December of, of 2015, he started talking about a Muslim registry. And I remember saying in early December when he said that, I said this is what Germany looked like in 1933, 1934. This is a real problem and I'm sure Republicans will reject this. Well now, after he talked about a Muslim registry, his numbers went up. Before the supert Tuesday primary in 2016, he denied knowing who David Duke was, despite the fact in 2000 he said he would not ever join the Reform Party because David Duke was in it and was a racist. He even sort of knocked around, feigned ignorance about the Ku Klux Klan, didn't want to say anything negative about the Ku Klux Klan. Again, something deeply disqualifying, something that we said at the time was deeply disqualifying. Wrote about in the Washington Post said it was deeply disqualifying. But after he said it, his numbers just went up with a course, his core supporters and the Republican Party. So he hasn't normalized it over 10 years. He normalized it very quickly. And there's a huge part of the Republican Party that was perfectly fine with that, which is why the party has led us to where they are and why I am no longer a Republican.
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B
I guess I grapple with what is the extent to which, the extent to where the party will go with this because some of the headlines, I mean obviously headlines all the time are really troubling. But you know, we've had a couple deaths, tragic deaths in the past week in Maine and Texas. The, the stories about the ICE agent in Maine in particular have really kind of shaken me in a way. This guy who his ex wife said he choked and slammed their 13 year old, choked and slammed her, threw the 13 year old daughter through a coffee table another wife has said that she had to get a protective order against him. I mean, these are the people that they're putting on the street. And I have to have to imagine that at a certain point the voter tolerance for this stuff is just exhausted. And I would like to think that a certain point Republican elected Republican appetite for this type of politics kind of exhausts itself. And yet you see Mark Wynne Mullen back office position that he's gonna stop these vehicle stops and then you see reports from the Times that they're not going to have the FBI investigate any of this conduct. So what is like the end principle of this? Where do I struggle with that? Like are we just going to be in this kind of militant state as long as Trump's in office?
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Well, you struggle with it because the Republican Party struggles with it because the White House struggles with it. Most of the people inside the White House.