On Monday MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough compared President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again rallies to the “Salem witch trials.”
The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard drew attention to Scarborough’s comparison, writing it up as his weekly “Liberal Media Scream” pick and delivering a rating of “four out of five screams.”
“If you don’t think people aren’t going to look back at those rallies with the same horror that we now look back on the Salem witch trials, you don’t think that’s going to happen 50 years from now, 100 years from now, you are kidding yourself,” Scarborough said on Morning Joe, continuing his rant against Trump:
In the middle of a pandemic, long after we are all gone, people will be showing these images and asking what happened to America, or at least a large subset of America. And what happened was Donald Trump, and history and Americans in the future are going to have to grapple with that, as are those right now who are working, day in and day out, to further his agenda or the tens of the millions of people who are actually going along with this.
Bedard reported that Brent Baker, vice president of research at Media Research Center (MRC) remarked on Scarborough’s comments that the Morning Joe host has “quite an imagination, assuming the wider population of Americans will be as outraged by President Trump in the future as he is now.”
“Many may consider it unwise to join large gatherings in the time of a pandemic, but President Trump isn’t forcing anyone to attend nor hanging anyone to death based on baseless fears,” Baker added. “The analogy is silly and an example of how elite media figures make it so easy for Trump to ridicule their hostility to him.”