Joe Scarborough (MSNBC)
President Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally Tuesday in Arizona, where he may pardon former Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- a move that MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said would be disastrously unwise.
The president may grant his first pardon to Arpaio -- a prominent "birther," anti-immigration hardliner and Trump backer -- but Scarborough questioned what Trump could possibly gain from the decision.
"If he does that, he may please three or four white nationalists, but he will further enrage every judge from Maine to Southern California," Scarborough said.
Arizona's two Republican senators are openly hostile to Trump, and Democrats from the state accused the president of considering the pardon to please his base after firing chief strategist Steve Bannon.
"It is a mirage that somehow there are going to be these white nationalists out there that are going to go up in arms, and if Donald Trump does the responsible thing and doesn't pull all the troops out of Afghanistan like Barack Obama did in Iraq back in 2011, which a lot of us thought (was) great," Scarborough said. "He's not going to lose any more support for looking presidential and listening to Gen. (H.R.) McMaster and Gen. (John) Kelly and Gen. (James) Mattis."
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