Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, along with network contributor John Heilemann, evaluated the politics of yesterday’s Mueller Report release and what that meant for not just congressional Democrats but 2020 Democratic Party presidential hopefuls as well.
Scarborough argued that despite conventional wisdom being yesterday’s release was a loss for Democrats because it did not offer a path forward against President Donald Trump, that the report was a win and it should be against Trump and his administration.
“[N]ow, during that conversation, I just had with Elijah Cummings I just thought of myself if I were a politician right now on the campaign trail, would I ignore what happened yesterday?” Scarborough said. “Because some people are saying there’s a win for Donald Trump. And the answer is no. I would fill up my political swimming pool with the Mueller report, and I would dive into it for the next year and a half, and I would talk about documented lies. It is now documented. They have now testified under oath Donald Trump’s own workers. He is a liar. His administration is packed with liars. It’s all in the report. And they’re the ones who admitted it starting with Sarah Sanders, all of them. Also, the obstruction of justice — any working man or woman in America, any small business owner, any Fortune 500 CEO, if they had attempted to obstruct justice the way Donald Trump did, they’d be in jail.”
Heilemann added that he believed the report would be a useful political tool for 2020 Democrats given it offers reasons to vote against Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
“I think we’ve talked about the complexities that Nancy Pelosi and others Democrats in Congress face on the impeachment question,” he said. “That’s a specific thing, and you can make arguments on both sides purely politically. If you’re a 2020 Democrat who’s trying to become the Democratic nominee and take Donald Trump on next fall you’ve got to understand that people often get confused about is a sitting president in a re-election fight, is it a referendum or is it a choice? Well, it’s both. It’s always both, and you’ve got to make yourself a plausible alternative.”
“But you’ve also got to prosecute the case politically, economically, socially, every other way against the incumbent that you’re not better off than you were four years ago and that the person in office is not going to be as good a president for the next four years as you would be,” Heilemann continued. “And if you think about the — it’s inevitable that Donald Trump’s character is going to be a big part of any campaign in 2020. And this document in addition to being potentially a road map to impeachment for Democrats in Congress — it provides a devastating, damning, detailed indictment of the president’s character in a way that stands up a lot of the arguments.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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