MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' panel was pretty much in agreement with regular guest Eugene Robinson, whose Washington Post op-ed Trump’s unhinged CPAC speech should concern us all, dropped on Monday: President Donald Trump's two-hour speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference sounded more like the deranged ramblings of “a mental patient,” the panelists agreed -- and his fans, who ate it up, were no better.
"It was insane," Robinson said. "It was two hours and 20 minutes of rambling, self-serving, self-justifying or at least an attempt to be self-justifying nonsense. If you heard grandpa talking like that, you'd be concerned."
"It was a greatest hits show is what it was," agreed host Willie Geist, noting some of Trump's familiar themes like "Crooked Hillary" and his inaugural crowd before asking conservative guest Thom Nichols if he'd seen the "elevation of conservative ideas" that typically marked CPAC in Trump's address.
"No," replied Nichols, who mocked the president for hugging the flag. "This whole thing was so scary that Republicans are now in 'Weekend at Bernie's' territory, just sort of putting him up there and saying 'let's see what happens and hoping no one notices.'"
"After a week of real defeat for this president, the public relations defeat with the Cohen testimony, and then obviously the failure to reach an agreement in Vietnam," the Associated Press's Jonathan Lemire said, "he needed an outlet, he needed some sort of release." He reminded that panel that after Trump's assault on the Affordable Care Act blew up in his face, he'd turned in a similar performance in an address to the Boy Scouts of America.
Mike Barnicle, however, stole the show and had the panel in stitches when he described what a tape of the speech would look like if someone "clipped out the introduction that he's the president."
"You would look at it as if, 'uh-oh, thankfully the guy doing the act out here is fully clothed, he's not wearing paper slippers, he's clearly a mental patient and somebody in his family had better hopefully come on stage and take him off,'" he said. I mean, it's that crazy." Barnicle wasn't impressed with Geist's suggestion that Trump was just playing to his fans, who he said were just as bad.
"That is a crowd that applauded the death of John McCain," he said. "I mean, c'mon!"
Watch the video below.
