After Weeks of Accusing Trump of Inaction, 'Morning Joe' Now Calls Him Authoritarian
The media is struggling to find the right tone in coverage of Trump and coronavirus.
They know their overall goal is to blame Trump. They just can’t decide whether they should attack him for being incompetent or for being an authoritarian dictator.
On Tuesday, Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” struggled with the dilemma yet again.
The show opened with a video montage of President Trump speaking. The video included a clip from the media briefing on April 13 in which Trump stated, “when somebody’s the President of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be.”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski commented that “President Trump added another step yesterday in his march toward authoritarianism.”
Scarborough took a different approach, though, and said he and his co-host “really differ here.”
“You’re very, very concerned when he talks like that, about the Constitution and the country. I’m actually mainly concerned for his mental health,” Scarborough said.
“I feel very very badly whenever he speaks that way … for the people at Penn,” he continued, “who have to walk around in shame every day that he graduated from their college knowing no more about history or the Constitution or Madisonian democracy than he does.”
“He’s just blathered for years, ‘Article 2 gives me all the power I need.’ … and he just goes back to saying he has ultimate power as President of the United States and he did it again yesterday.”
But it was less than a month ago that Scarborough was demanding the president exercise unprecedented executive authority.
“The President needs to issue a stay at home order today. His further delays will cost more lives,” Scarborough tweeted.
The President needs to issue a stay at home order today. His further delays will cost more lives. https://t.co/7YDRPqG2mf
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) March 25, 2020
Critics have even pointed out that the president lacks the authority to issue a nationwide “stay at home” order like the one demanded by Scarborough.
The White House has not ordered anyone to stay home. Rather, the administration has issued guidelines to promote safety in the face of the pandemic and “slow the spread.”
Scarborough wants an executive “stay at home” order and suggests failure to issue one is causing people to die.
That suggestion sounds a lot like wanting the president to exercise “total” authority. Yet, when Trump says his authority is total, Scarborough accuses him of being mentally ill.
It’s almost as if Trump cannot win in the eyes of the media, no matter what he says or does.
And, of course, he cannot win with Democrats.
The Democratic Party leaders are already preparing another round of bogus investigations, despite evidence that leaders within the party were happy to downplay the threat of coronavirus as late as February.
It is hard to imagine that Democrats or the media would have been happy if Trump had issued an executive “stay at home” order in March, especially in the middle of a close primary race.
There are already plenty of reasons for the left to be worried about the election results. If Trump had done anything that could be perceived as interfering in the primary process, the media would be screaming he used coronavirus to steal the election.
The election has not even happened yet and they are already preparing excuses for a loss.
However, since Trump did not shut things down, members of the media are happy to complain about it in retrospect.
They claim he did not do enough in February and March, while also claiming he is an authoritarian. There is no logical way to make both attacks at once.
As pointed out by Rich Lowry in The New York Post, the criticism of Trump as a power-hungry dictator does not exactly make sense.
“Ordinarily, tyrants aren’t bystanders,” Lowry wrote. “They don’t give other political players and civic institutions wide latitude to make their own decisions. They don’t have to be pushed to declare a national emergency unlocking various powers. They don’t have to be lobbied to call out the military to deal with a domestic problem.”
Trump may have commented about the total authority of the presidency, but his actions and statements suggest he is interested in using executive authority to enhance freedoms, not restrict them.
He wants people out of lockdown and the economy reopened.
If anyone is attempting to gain total authority, it is the tyrannical state governors who are using the virus as an excuse for arbitrary power grabs. They are the ones who are trampling on the constitutional rights of their constituents.
Ironically, the media elite call Trump a dictator because he wants to allow people to get back to working their jobs and living their lives. They seem completely blind to the fact that people want this too.
Thankfully, Trump seems to know what he is up against and so do the voters.
If Democrats had their way, people would stay locked inside their homes until after election day. Trump is not going to allow that to happen.
The media is going to have a hard time convincing the public that Trump is abusing his authority, simply because he wants to restore American freedoms.
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