MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Monday reacted to Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) interview with Axios in which he said he wants to “harness the magic” of former President Donald Trump to help strengthen the GOP.
Scarborough questioned what Graham meant by “magic,” arguing Trump’s violent rhetoric is more like “fascism” and “sedition.” The host said such rhetoric is “your Republican Party” now.
“Harness the magic? He led an insurrection to overturn a constitutional process that guaranteed the peaceful transition of power,” Scarborough advised. “Harness the magic? Calling for violence. Not just then but looking at his television set gleefully while Kevin McCarthy and others were screaming at him, begging him to call off his terrorists. That’s actually — that’s not magic. That’s sedition. I mean, we’re all talking about 1/6, but it’s not like a week before the election, he wasn’t refusing to actually guarantee a peaceful transition. It’s not like a week or two before the election he wasn’t … pressuring his attorney general to arrest his political opponent two weeks before an election or telling white supremacist groups with a history of violence to stand by. Magic. … Lindsey Graham defines that as magic. I mean, it’s the definition of fascism. It really is.”
“I mean, somebody that, again, an ultra-right nationalist that is always talking about, you know, attacking the others, somebody who talks about violence, uses violent rhetoric, which he did going back to 2016 and his campaign events, telling people to beat up protesters in the crowd and he’d pay for their legal fees, bragging about a Republican congressman who beat up and got arrested for beating up a reporter because the reporter asked him a question about health care policy? You know, that’s not magic. But that is Lindsey Graham. And that is, ladies and gentlemen, your Republican Party,” he concluded.
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