Morning Joe: Ukraine resistance blew up Trump and Putin’s attacks on democracy — and delivered Biden a big win
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said it's only taken a week to significantly roll back Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin's attacks on liberal democracy.
The U.S. and other NATO allies have presented a united front against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, after Trump spent his four years in the White House undermining the organization and threatening to withdraw, which would have delivered Putin one of his most cherished goals.
"Western liberalism, western democracy has been under attack over the past five, six, seven years," Scarborough said. "You saw it with Donald Trump attacking NATO, attacking Madisonian democracy, attacking the rule of law, attacking the free press. You saw that in Poland with the Law and Justice party. You saw that in Hungary. Of course, their north star was always Vladimir Putin who was the most tyrannical. That's all changed in the past week. My God, Poland, what extraordinary allies they are right now. You look at Hungary, even Viktor Orbán came out, who would have believed it, came out criticizing Vladimir Putin."
"You have so many other people here speaking, Republicans talking like Republicans used to speak when I was a Republican, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, when Margaret Thatcher was at 10 Downing," Scarborough added. "They're actually talking about liberal democracy and what is at stake there. You look at the institutions of NATO over the past week. The European Union, as I said, and you jokingly responded, 'Hey, the chocolate makers? Pretty damn good allies after all,' and you said, 'Yeah, and I hear they make a few good cars, too.'"
Scarborough expressed surprise by how swiftly the world order has shifted away from Trump and Putin.
"The world has changed," he said. "It is a crisis in Ukraine, but the western world that was under attack from Vladimir Putin, from Donald Trump, from Viktor Orbán, from Trumpists in America, it is no longer under attack. The EU is stronger than ever. NATO is stronger than ever. Western democracies, institutions stronger than ever, and it all happened this week."
President Joe Biden should highlight in Tuesday night's State of the Union Address.
"That's something for the president to talk about instead of saying, yeah, the SWIFT banking sanction, if you look at the two banks," Scarborough said. "No, no, no -- go full Reagan, go full JFK, go full Churchill."
The crisis could offer an opportunity for Biden to help break the fever that's gripped the Republican Party since Trump's emergence as a political candidate.
"If this moment in history and what is happening in Ukraine is a way Biden can explain to his Republican counterparts that this is why we have to come back to our democratic values, that if these people can stand up to Putin perhaps you can stand up to a tweet from Donald Trump and come back to American values," Scarborough said. "This is the one thing that we can agree on when we see the carnage that is happening across the world."
"These people are becoming more and more isolated because what was in vogue six months ago, a year ago, suddenly, well, it has just crashed up against reality," he added. "These Putin-loving illiberal democrats [are] looking very, very bad right now."
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