MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski blasted President Donald Trump for inspiring violence against journalists with his rhetoric -- and helping autocrats cover up those attacks on the free press.
Trump offered an excuse for Saudi Arabia's apparent abduction, murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi -- and the "Morning Joe" hosts said that was the latest episode in a disturbing pattern.
"It is getting more dangerous by the day for journalists across the world, and now apparently even journalists who work for the Washington Post now have to worry about governments like Saudi Arabia abducting them, killing them and cutting them up with bone saws," Scarborough said.
Brzezinski said the president always sided with dictators, even when they murdered their critics.
"Look, this is vintage Trump, sowing doubt, propping up dictators and people who are clearly on the side of wrong," she said. "Look at him in the face of this, accusations that every day point more to what happened, and he's so in doubt and protecting them and saying maybe it could have been this or maybe it could have been that. He is showing extreme naïvité on the world stage and it makes him look like a weak leader."
Scarborough spat contempt toward the president, and compared his latest surrender to an autocrat to his performance alongside Russian president Vladimir Putin in Finland.
"He does look so weak and so pathetic, just like he did in Helsinki," Scarborough said. "You have a guy who is scared of KGB agents, not man enough to stand up to former KGB agents and not man enough to stand up to Saudi sheikhs. That's what we have in a president?"
Brzezinski wondered whether the president was being blackmailed.
"Whatever they have on him better be worth it because he looks like a bumbling idiot," she said.
Scarborough said Trump's loyalty had been bought by the Saudis who booked his hotel rooms and bought his condos.
"It's just money, I guess," he said. "Is this what Donald Trump promised people? I thought he was going to be a strong leader. Instead, he's kowtowing and letting these autocrats, letting these tyrants kill journalists in the light of day."
