MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Monday reacted to recent remarks made by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), which he called a “blaring horn to white supremacists and racists.”
Scarborough noted that Nunes said Democrats hate white people, and Cotton wrote that the Founding Fathers thought slavery was “a necessary evil.” Although Cotton later clarified the comments, Scarborough said everyone “can read English” and knows what the senator was trying to say.
“This weekend, I saw two quotes, one from Devin Nunes, talking about the Democratic Party, quote, ‘hating white people,'” Scarborough emphasized. “It’s not a dog whistle. That is a blaring, blaring horn to white supremacists and racists. And then you had Tom Cotton, and he’s tried to push back on this, but the guy went to Harvard Law School, he knows how to draft a sentence. And this is what Tom Cotton wrote: ‘As the Founding Fathers said, slavery was the necessary evil upon which the union was built.’ We’ll let Tom Cotton try to clean that up over the next several days. We all can read English. He tried blaming that on the media. He should blame it on himself or whoever drafted that.”
Scarborough added that such comments, which he called “blatant racism,” are “devastating and self-defeating” to the GOP and President Donald Trump’s reelection bid.
“Rev, these sort of quotes not only damage Donald Trump and Republican senators with black voters, with Latino voters, with Asian-American voters, it, of course, damages Donald Trump’s prospects of ever winning back white suburban voters in the suburbs of Philly, in the I-4 corridor in Macomb County, Michigan, in the suburbs of, you know, Milwaukee, the suburbs of Pittsburgh,” he stated. “This blatant racism is devastating and self-defeating not only to Donald Trump’s election chances but also to a lot of the Republican senators in Arizona and North Carolina.”
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