MSNBC’s Morning Joe crew were left in hysterics Wednesday morning over Donald Trump’s barking-mad claim in the presidential debate that immigrants are eating people’s dogs.
The show aired a montage of some of the most iconic moments in history from previous debates, including Ronald Reagan’s “there you go again” line used against Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Lloyd Bentsen’s 1988 quip assuring Dan Quayle that he was “no Jack Kennedy.” The compilation ended with Trump saying: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs! The people that came in, they’re eating the cats!”
Trump was talking about a baseless rumor that went viral this week about Haitian migrants in Springfield eating pets and other animals, including ducks and geese. When ABC News moderator David Muir told Trump during the debate that city officials had denied the rumors, the former president insisted he’d seen “people on television saying ‘my dog was taken and used for food.’”
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After laughing at Trump’s line, Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough couldn’t resist repeating it himself, imitating the Republican nominee’s accent to say: “They’re eating their dawgs!”
“He thinks that’s true?” co-host Mika Brzezinski added. “Because he watches it on Fox News? Doesn’t he know better?”
Scarborough followed up to say there was no way of hiding the fact that “Donald Trump lost massively” in the debate. “What are they gonna do?” he asked, referring to Trump’s supporters. “They’re gonna be doubling down on their lies today, tomorrow, next week—and it’s only going to hurt him in the end, because people saw what they saw last night and there’s no sane-washing it.”
Willie Geist responded by asking who Trump was trying to appeal to with the line. “If you are, again, a normal person, which most Americans are, who are living their lives and don’t live in the dark corners of the internet, you’d have no clue what he’s talking about,” Geist said.
Scarborough also laughed that they were even talking about such a bizarre issue the morning after a presidential debate. “That’s where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party,” he said. “That’s where Donald Trump has taken entire cable news networks. That’s where Donald Trump has taken his online community of supporters. They have to support that madness.”
