MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Monday addressed Donald Trump calling him a “sick puppy” in a Fox News interview over the weekend.
The former president made the slight against the Morning Joe star after Scarborough railed against Trump’s rhetoric on Real Time With Bill Maher last week, claiming that Trump’s “people have said they’re going to arrest my producers.” In an interview with Fox’s MediaBuzz Sunday, Trump claimed that “nobody said that,” adding: “Look, Joe’s a sick puppy.”
Scarborough mentioned the insult on Monday’s Morning Joe while discussing an article from the Wall Street Journal editorial board. The piece contends that describing Trump as a “fascist” is a now a meme, adding that one particular “writer for The Atlantic takes the hyperbole prize with a headline that says Mr. Trump is talking like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.”
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Scarborough defended Anne Applebaum—the writer of the Atlantic article which drew parallels between Trump’s rhetoric and that of fascist leaders—praising her as someone who “continues to try to talk about the challenge of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.”
“Anne Applebaum is the person here called out as being the radical leftist,” Scarborough said. “It’s revealing isn’t it?” Pointing at himself, he added: “And here, somebody with a 95 percent conservative lifetime record in Congress—we’re the leftists? We’re the quote ‘sick puppies,’ as Donald Trump said yesterday?”
Without naming MediaBuzz host Howard Kurtz by name, Scarborough nevertheless criticized him for failing to challenge Trump’s denials about his associates threatening Morning Joe producers with arrest.
“Another Fox News interviewer said: ‘Joe Scarborough said that you once said that you were going—that your people said that they were gonna go after Morning Joe,’” Scarborough said, paraphrasing Kurtz’s question to Trump. “Instead of just playing the tape of Kash Patel saying that and Steve Bannon saying that, giving him that evidence. Again, it’s smoke and mirrors.”
Scarborough appeared to be referring to an episode of Bannon’s “War Room” podcast from December 2023. Patel—who served in national security roles in Trump’s first administration and is now reportedly being considered as a potential CIA director if Trump returns to the White House—was asked by Bannon about his readiness for revenge if Trump wins in 2024.
“Do you feel confident that you’ll be able to deliver the goods, that we can have serious prosecutions and accountability?” Bannon, the former Trump adviser jailed this year on contempt of Congress charges, asked Patel at the time. “I want the Morning Joe producers that watch us, and all the producers that watch us—this is just not rhetoric. We’re absolutely dead serious.”
Patel answered that he was confident it can be done. “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” Patel said. “Yes, we’re gonna come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections, we’re gonna come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out, but yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
