‘The president is surrounded by people who hate him and hate each other -- that’s very good news for Bob Mueller’: NYT reporter

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough wasn't really surprised by anything he read in Michael Wolff's explosive new book on the Trump presidency -- and he gloated over Steve Bannon turning on the president.

The host of "Morning Joe" warned President Donald Trump not to bring his former campaign manager into the White House, and he said Bannon's betrayal signaled a worrisome trend for the president as he faces multiple investigations of his campaign ties to Russia.

"If are you a prosecutor and you're looking at this situation, you are looking at a cast of characters that one by one by one are turning on the president of the United States, and all the president's men and all the president's women, right now it's looking like, of the loyalists around Donald Trump, it's now boiled down to basically Trump and his children who are still loyal to him," Scarborough said.

"What is the impact of having the national security adviser who spent more time with him on planes campaigning in 2016 and was seen as the guy that Trump trusted to have around him the most, now cooperating with the feds? What does it mean to have the campaign manager now, of course, in trouble with the feds, possibly facing a lifetime in jail? What does it mean when you have one of his top foreign policy guys now cooperating with the FBI, and now you have his final campaign manager, his top political strategist, accusing the president and all the president's men and women of treason? What does that do to the prosecutor?"

New York Times national political correspondent Nick Confessore, who has questioned the accuracy of some passages in Wolff's book, said he was not surprised by many of the revelations -- although he was astonished by the viciousness of the quotes.

"I have never seen anything in presidential politics that is remotely like that anywhere, it's astonishing," Confessore said. "This is a president, in Wolff's telling, who is surrounded by people who hate him and hate each other and don't respect him. It is hard to imagine the first six months or a year in the White House, with that much open disdain for a guy in the Oval Office. It is impossible for a presidency to function in those conditions, and we are seeing this presidency does not function in an orderly way."

"It's very good news for Bob Mueller, by the way, and if he wants to kind of kind of peel these people apart, he has a lot to work a lot to work with," Confessore added.