MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough said on “Morning Joe” that President Donald Trump has injected Islamophobia into Michigan’s Senate race as a closing argument, and that the campaign “has just been fed by bigotry.”
Scarborough described Trump’s final pitch to Black and Jewish voters as saying they’d be “crazy” to vote for Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, and that even if they don’t, “you’re crazy anyway.” He called it “a departure from norms” not seen “since David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana.”
Trump, he continued, has played on identity rifts before and is “trying to recycle” the Islamophobia arguments from 2016 and 2024.
Scarborough said that reflects “a lack of actual ideas,” adding that Republican strategists have told them for weeks “they simply don’t have anything to run on.”
Analyst Molly Jong-Fast agreed and said the party is in “panic mode,” noting that AIPAC has spent in both the primary and the general election, so “there is a sense that there is a divide there to try and get into.” She said Trump “loves a divide.”
Scarborough also criticized Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for “denigrating a billion plus Muslims,” and said Republican Mike Rogers, whom he has known, “has just really got down in the mud.” He said Rogers “could have won this race without all of that Islamophobia,” and that if he loses, it will be “one of the reasons.”