'He's a racist': Morning Joe rips Trump voters for 'active choice' to endorse his bigotry

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough condemned Donald Trump's latest racist attacks on the judge overseeing his New York hush money trial, and he refused to let voters off the hook for supporting his bigotry.

The former president questioned Justice Juan Merchan's background in an 11-minute rant outside the men's restrooms in a Manhattan courthouse, saying the Colombia-born judge "hates" him due to his ethnic background – "take a look at where he comes from" – and the "Morning Joe" host lamented the lows to which Trump stoops.

"It's far more than just concerning or nerve-racking – this is just open, blatant racism that's now been sort of mainstreamed into American political life," Scarborough said. "This did shock people back in 2016 when he was talking about the judge from Mexico, but here is a guy now that says, 'Take a look at him, look at him, see where he's from,' and I will tell you, this is what separates Donald Trump for myself, from me or for most Americans. I look at [Merchan] and go, Madison Avenue? Upper East Side? That's what I see when I see him. I'm dead serious. Donald Trump speaks in code because he wants people to see the judge as another. Everybody is another unless their immigrant parents were from Scotland and Germany."

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Trump infamously attacked another Hispanic judge, the Indiana-born Gonzalo Curiel, who oversaw his class-action lawsuit he settled with students who said they'd been defrauded by Trump University before he became president, and Scarborough blamed his voters for embracing the racism that had always been emphasized in his political career.

"The men's club grill at country clubs that are perfectly fine voting for a guy who talks about vermin, a Nazi term, who also uses sort of the fascist slogan of 'go back to where you came from' for sitting members of Congress that don't happen to be white, and then, yesterday, just take a look at him," Scarborough said. "Just say, seriously? Like what is this, 1933? It still needs to be shocking to us today."

"Voters -- I won't say they become desensitized because that's giving them far, far too much leniency," Scarborough added. "The fact is -- well, I mean, they're voting for a racist. It's an active choice to vote for someone who said in December of -- and I know this because I was a lifelong Republican who on this show in early December of 2015, when he was talking about Muslim registry, said, 'I would never vote for a man like that in my life, regardless of if it were my father or a woman if it was my mother, I would never,' right? That's an active choice to say I'm going to vote for him even though he's supporting Muslim registries. I'm going to vote for him even though he's using the old fascist line, 'go back to where you came from.' I'm going to vote for him, these men's grill enablers are saying, when he says, just take a look at him, look at where he's from. This isn't a passive choice. This isn't, 'Oh, I'm so dumb,' they can't even hear what he's saying. No, this is them hearing that he's a racist. These are racist terms."

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