MSNBC’s Morning Joe explains the ‘stupid’ reason Trump is cranking up his extremist racist rants

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough believes President Donald Trump's racist attacks on Democratic lawmakers are both a political calculation and an essential element of character.

Sam Stein, senior politics editor for HuffPost, wondered whether Trump was telling the four lawmakers -- all women of color, all American citizens and all but one born in the U.S. -- to go back to their home countries because he was genuinely just racist, and not playing a cynical gambit for racist voters, but the "Morning Joe" host said both could be true.

"I think it can be both," Scarborough said. "I think it can be deeply embedded in his character and at the same time, I think he read Maureen Dowd's (New York Times) column on Sunday morning an said, 'Oh, wait a second, Democrats are fighting each other, let me drive a wedge between the two sides, and I'll attack the four people that Nancy Pelosi is attacking.'"

"Yes, he's shrewd enough to know if he attacks the four women and says the things that he says that some people will predictably blame Nancy Pelosi for that," he added, "which of course, as Maureen Dowd pointed out, is about the stupidest take you could have. But it's happened."

Scarborough said the president's reliance on solidifying the support of racist voters made no sense.

"Politics is a game of addition and not subtraction," he said. "You want to make friends, you want to get more people voting for you -- not less. Donald Trump and his approach over the past three years in office has made no sense to me because he has been playing a game of subtraction."

"He has boiled down his support, he continues to boil down his support to the most hardcore people, and this does not seem to be the workings of a shrewd politician," Scarborough added. "It seems to be the workings of a one-trick pony who can only do one thing, and that one thing has made him the only president to never cross the 50 percent threshold in approval ratings."