MSNBC’s Morning Joe rips his own network for airing 'rambling illiterate' Trump's time-wasting press conference

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski unloaded on President Donald Trump for dragging his medical experts onstage to watch him push an unproven coronavirus treatment.

The "Morning Joe" co-hosts ripped the president for calling an unscheduled press briefing Sunday to promote hydroxychloroquine -- which White House officials and medical experts disagree over its effectiveness as a treatment for the deadly virus.

"This is when the idiots have been exposed for who they are in the time of America's greatest needs," Scarborough said. "Last night, the president attacked a governor, he pushed an unproven drug, and then he continued, saying that the buck doesn't stop here. I must ask, Mika, what did America get out of cable news networks running a two-hour rambling press conference, where he says the same exact things every time?"

Scarborough said the president neglected to give an update on the medical supply shortage and the continued testing shortfall.

"I mean, dramatic testing shortages in the president's hometown county, where Mar-A-Lago is, Palm Beach County, and you also have the numbers spiking up across the nation," he said. "We have a crisis of hospital beds, not only in New York City, but I'm worried about rural America, where the rural health cares been ravaged over the past decade by continual cuts in Medicaid by Republicans. We're in a crisis, and he's continuing for, what, the third week now, to push an unproven drug."

Scarborough ripped his own network for broadcasting those news conferences.

"Why is MSNBC, why is CNN, why is Fox, why is any network running these press conferences where he keeps talking about an unproven drug that might work for malaria, might work for lupus, doesn't work for this?" he said.

Brzezinski questioned whether Trump had a personal stake in that drug, and she asked why he pulled his medical experts away from their work to stand alongside him onstage.

"A lot of people would say, follow the money, there's got to be some sort of financial tie to someone somewhere that has the president pushing this repeatedly," she said. "More importantly, he had Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and Dr. [Deborah] Birx, which most people -- I think we can universally agree -- are trying to slow the spread or trying to contain this virus, are trying to save American lives. We are looking at our worst week yet ahead."

"They're trying to save American lives, and he has them scrambling for 90 minutes to prepare for a two-hour news conference," Brzezinski added. "He's going to exhaust his top tier so he can get his needy camera time, so he can get out there and riff, quite frankly, illiterately, saying things that aren't true, going off script. By the way, I have to ask, who wrote that script? It was as if an eighth-grade politics debate team wrote it. It was pathetic. We are this a place right now where the president is getting in the way of progress and taking time away from the team that is supposed to be helping us get out of this crisis. He wasted our time and theirs."