INVESTIGATIONS

Joe Scarborough feels the pain of panic-stricken liberals in the age of Trump 2.0., and is doing his best to talk them off the ledge. Here was Scarborough on today’s Morning Joe:

SCARBOROUGH: Just as we would say in Congress, a point of personal privilege, because I did something this weekend that I just had not done in a while, and I went through emails of people who watched the show and went into the public email file, deeply concerned, and did my best to reassure them that — what we need to do to get through moments like these, quoting everybody from Rudyard Kipling to Martin Luther King to James Madison. 

Scarborough also tried to rouse the audience by reading at length from a New York Times editorial board column similarly trying to encourage Trump antagonists not to lose hope, to stay engaged against “the efforts to dismantle the federal government, the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people, and the very concept of diversity itself….they need to be challenged boldly and thoughtfully with the confidence that the nation’s systems of checks and balances will prove up to the task.”

Jon Meacham was not so sanguine. He expressed profound fear over JD Vance’s X post, which simply stated the incontrovertible fact that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Meacham worried that Vance:

“Might be setting a predicate for the kind of showdown that would potentially, potentially, break apart this constitutional system of checks and balances.”

Reading such an ominous threat into Vance’s anodyne statement says more about Meacham’s fragile state of mind than anything the Vice President wrote. But he was the Biden speechwriter who claimed we all had a “patriotic duty” to vote for Biden. The feelings of rejection must be intense. 

Note: Scarborough yet again managed, on the thinnest of reeds, to remind people that he had been a congressman. He prefaced his mention of responding to viewer emails by saying, “As we would say in Congress, a point of personal privilege.”

Here’s the transcript.

MSNBC
Morning Joe
2/10/25
6:09 am ET

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Just, as we would say in Congress, a point of personal privilege. Because I did something this weekend that I just had not done in a while, and I went through emails of people who watch the show, and went into the public email file, deeply concerned, and did my best to reassure them that what we need to do to get through moments like these, quoting everybody from Rudyard Kipling to Martin Luther King to James Madison. 

But the New York Times, it’s just one of these moments, and you know this as a writer, where people will come up to you and thank you for saying things, writing things, that they have felt in their heart and that they have tried to express, but haven’t been able to do it as effectively as you have. 

I think all the things I’ve been trying to tell people about keeping calm,  carrying on, and staying focused and staying informed, the New York Times handled it wonderfully. 

And if, if you’ll you’ll give me the privilege of time to read the New York Times and what they say. 

“What this moment calls for. Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposefully creating with the volume and speed of executive orders. The efforts to dismantle the federal government, the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people, and the very concept of diversity itself. The demands that other countries accept Americans as their new overlords. And the dizzying sense that the White House could do or say anything at any moment. All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived, and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. 

“For goodness sake,” writes the Times, “Don’t tune out. The actions of the presidency needs to be tracked, and when they cross moral or legal lines, they need to be challenged boldly and thoughtfully with the confidence that the nation’s systems of checks and balances will prove up to the task.”

. . .

J.D. Vance’s tweet yesterday that courts cannot stop a president’s legitimate power, I mean, of course they can’t. But it is the courts, and not Vice Presidents. It is William Rehnquist and it is Warren Burger that determined the outlines of a president’s authority, and not Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. That is, we saw that in Nixon v. U.S. I suspect we will see that again soon.  But it is important I, I love this editorial and I’m wondering what you took from it. 

. . . 

JON MEACHAM: The thing that is the most troubling to me in the past x number of days was the Vice President weighing in, in that way. 

Because it felt to me, and I hope, I pray that I’m wrong. It felt to me as if it might be setting a predicate. A predicate for the kind of showdown that would potentially, potentially, break apart this constitutional system of checks and balances. 

“Fact checkers” at the anti-Trump website The Dispatch tried to scold critics enraged over the millions in taxpayer dollars wasted on “Politico Pro” subscriptions, and ended up looking completely ridiculous in the process.

Facebook hired The Dispatch as part of its fact-checker squad, perhaps to lend an appearance of balance, as they have claimed. This wasn’t balanced. 

Following the uproar over the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other government agencies doling out $8.2 million on Politico’s wildly overpriced Pro subscriptions between 2024 and 2025 alone, The Dispatch fact-checker Alex Demas followed with a knee-jerk response on February 5: “Claims That Politico Received USAID Funds Are False.”

What? 

Not only was this so-called “fact-check” headline ironically not true, given that USAID demonstrably spent at least $44,000 on subscriptions, Demas undercut his entire argument by conceding that the USAID funding for Politico did indeed exist:

The only payments received by Politico LLC from USAID were for two subscriptions to E&E—an energy and environment publication it produces—totaling $44,000 over two years. 

Derp. 

The Dispatch was forced to change the headline later, and astonishingly managed to make itself look more foolish by shifting the goalposts all over the field: “No, Politico Did Not Receive ‘Substantial Funds’ from USAID.” 

What counts as “Substantial,” of course,” is completely subjective. Fox News noted that Politico Pro base subscriptions “are typically between $12,000 and $15,000 for three users.” In perspective, wrote The Federalist senior editor John Daniel Davidson in an X post: “if Politico subscriptions are $10K that’s not a subscription that’s patronage.” But apparently subscriptions that are worth over $10,000 are not considered “substantial” by The Dispatch’s political metrics. 

Newsflash, Dispatch: This is not how fact-checks are supposed to work. But the outlet wasn’t finished butchering the facts. Its initial article falsely claimed that the $8.2 million referred to payments between 2016 and 2025, when the figure only referred to payments made between 2024 and 2025. The outlet’s “correction” note at the bottom of the updated article was nothing short of hilarious:

The headline of this piece has been updated to more accurately describe the contents of the fact check. While Politico LLC did receive funds from USAID and other government agencies, the money was not for grants but payment for subscriptions to its publications. Also, the $8.2 million figure cited refers to payments in the 12 months leading up to February 2025, not dating back to 2016.

Oh, well as long as it’s just “subscriptions” and not “grants,” right? How is this any better? It’s still taxpayer money funding a leftist media outlet that falsely bills itself as being a bastion of  “nonpartisan journalism!” It’s a wonder if The Dispatch or Politico for that matter ever bothered to read the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.

One of the posts that Demas took issue with was from independent journalist Kyle Becker, who simply posted snapshots on February 5 of the millions Politico got from a litany of government agencies and accurately captioned it: “Fun Fact: @Politico received USAID funds. Everything makes sense now.”

But Demas — in some sort of weird bout with incredulity — concluded that Becker’s claim was “false.” Of course, nowhere did Demas note Becker’s follow-up post published the same day as his initial post, which included the clarification: “Just to be clear, Politico was getting funds from all sorts of government agencies for extremely pricey Politico Pro subscriptions.” 

But Demas still attempted to downplay the significance of the government turning Politico into its personal public relations arm by objecting, “Various government agencies have purchased subscriptions to its publications since 2016.”

Great Scott! It’s like watching a train wreck happen in real time.