MSNBC’s Morning Joe asks GOP senators how many Americans must die until they turn on Trump

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough laid the blame for most of the U.S. coronavirus deaths on President Donald Trump's failure of leadership.

Instead of offering accurate information about the deadly virus, the "Morning Joe" host said the president tried to create an "alternate reality" to protect his own political fortunes instead of American lives.

"It is breathtaking, but this is what would-be autocrats do," Scarborough said. "It's what they do across the world. They create their own reality, an alternate reality, and they invite their followers to come along and, like cult members, a lot of them do. A lot of them believe the alternate reality, and that's why Donald Trump still has the 40 percent or so hardcore support that he does have because he has gotten people to buy into alternative facts."

Those same followers have swallowed Trump's lies about the Russia investigation, Scarborough said, and now they're accepting the president's lies about the pandemic and how it might be contained.

"This alternate reality has now killed 150,000 Americans," Scarborough said. "Who knows how many lives could have been saved if Donald Trump had taken this seriously as Joe Biden."

Biden wrote an op-ed in January for USA Today, where he urged the president to listen to his scientists and keep politics out of the pandemic, but instead Trump managed the public health crisis as a political crisis.

"He's telling you now, cult followers, it is what it is, it is what it is," Scarborough said. "Are you going to continue following him, over 200,000 deaths, 250,000? How long do you go, Republican senators, until you speak up and start being more worried about the lives of the senior citizens in your district than the loyalty you show to a man who has shown no loyalty to you or your people? That's a question, because he's not getting better, Republican senators."