Trump officials feared 'clowns' would replace them if they revealed White House chaos: Morning Joe

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough explained why Trump administration officials waited to reveal some of the former president's "out-of-control" behavior in books after leaving office, rather than sound the alarm at the time.

Former defense secretary Mark Esper was scheduled to appear Tuesday on "Morning Joe," where he was promoting his own book about his experience serving Donald Trump, and the host admitted some conflicting thoughts on the situation.

"I must say, I'm of two minds," Scarborough said. "Yes, maybe you should have spoken out a little bit earlier, but as you know, these are great -- these are things we can file away and look at. It really gives us a much better perspective about what happened, especially in the final year. So many things of what Mark Esper wrote here, it is going to be studied for many years to come by historians, along with the other books that were written, as they try to figure out what safeguards to put in place when you have somebody who is as out-control Donald Trump in a position of power where he doesn't want to give up the presidency."

One former administration official after another has come forward after Trump's presidency ended to reveal the chaos, infighting and possibly criminal activity in the administration, but Scarborough said those former public servants may have had good reason to stay silent and continue serving.

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"You interviewed Deborah Birx a couple of weeks ago, and, my gosh, she got absolutely skewered while she was still in the White House," Scarborough said. "But, you know, I looked at her even at that time and said, 'She's in an extraordinarily difficult position,' because, yes, she's working for a guy who is denying science. But who follows her? Sure enough, when she left, we started dealing with Scott Atlas, who is just absolutely heinous, gave Donald Trump everything he wanted to hear, was a clown."

"You could say the same about Dan Coats," he added. "After Dan Coats left, the clowns that followed him were absolutely frightening. The fact that they were involved in our intelligence community, the head of our intelligence community, is frightening. Yeah, it's not as simple as a lot of people on Twitter like to say it is."

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