'Takes your breath away': Morning Joe panel stunned by Trump's latest praise of dictators

A panel on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Wednesday expressed shock over former President Donald Trump's latest praise for authoritarian dictators.

At the start of the segment, the show played excerpts of a Tuesday night interview Trump conducted with Fox News' Tucker Carlson in which he gushed over the "look" of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and also praised the purported high intelligence of Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

"It takes your breath away," commented panelist Willie Geist. "He's talking about Xi like a matinee idol: The Hollywood look... the brains, all of it."

Geist went on to argue that Trump's praise of Putin seems particularly ill-timed given how the Russian leader has wasted more than a year and gotten tens of thousands of his own soldiers killed for making only small gains in his invasion of Ukraine.

DON'T MISS: Fired Fox producer: Network has secret tapes of Rudy Giuliani

Host Joe Scarborough said that this is part of a pattern that Trump has been engaged in for years.

"You look at the people that he praises, and first of all, it's abhorrent that he's praising some of the most evil leaders on the world stage," he said. "This is something that he did starting here in 2015 when he came on our show and talked about how great Vladimir Putin was and how horrible Barack Obama was."

Scarborough added that it was "very disturbing for the cult-like followers that he still has that will worship a guy who worships the biggest tyrants."

Watch the video below or at this link.

Trump's latest gushing praise of dictatorswww.youtube.com