MSNBC's Joe Scarborough mocked Republicans for descending into self-parody so "stupid" that "South Park" wouldn't even lampoon it.
The president claimed during an interview with "60 Minutes" that he didn't know who crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao was, despite pardoning him after his company helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase of a Trump family crypto enterprise, and "Morning Joe" co-host Jonathan Lemire cast doubt on his claims.
"Let's remember, this guy admitted to it, he confessed to this money laundering scheme, and yet President Trump claims that he doesn't know who he is," Lemire said of Zhao. "Now, whether that's true, it's disturbing either way."
"The autopen strikes again, I guess," Lemire added. "No, it's either he doesn't know, which is preposterous, or, of course, he does know, and he simply thinks that denying it on national television is a better look for him trying to create some distance from a pardon that's obviously controversial."
Republicans have remained silent about Zhao's pardon and haven't really spoken out against the Jan. 6 pardons that came within hours of his return to the White House, and Scarborough said they haven't really challenged his use of the Justice Department to target his enemies.
"These are the people that were melting down and freaking out for years over Hunter Biden, right, [non-fungible tokens] and Hunter Biden paintings selling for how much, $50,000, $75,000? I don't know how much they were selling for, it wasn't $2 billion. I mean, the cryptocurrency alone is just absolutely crazy, and, you know, send people all over the earth to investigate, like Hunter Biden and a $3 million deal, the amount of which we don't know how much Hunter Biden got. But, again, here we have the same people that melted down for years over that cool about Qatari jets, $2 billion in cryptocurrency here, Trump meme coins. You just go down the list of things and the things that they freaked out and melted down and investigated before are 1/1000 if that of what they were melting down about about Hunter Biden in NFTs."
"It's like 'South Park' wouldn't even touch this because it's it would be such a stupid, stupid parody of what actually the Republican Party has become, what these MAGA followers have become and what they will do, they'll justify absolutely anything," Scarborough added. "And the comparison. I had one guy, one reporter in the MAGA bubble for years, for years, hectoring me, going, 'What was Hunter Biden doing on Air Force Two? Oh my God, what was Hunter Biden doing on Air Force Two?'"
That MAGA reporter hectored him about Hunter Biden for years, Scarborough said, so he called him recently to ask about the Trump family business dealings.
"I call him up and I go, all right, so that's fine, so tell me about the Trump meme coin. How much, a billion? How much money did Donald Trump make? 'Oh, that's the most corrupt thing I've ever heard in my life,' he says to me one day and then never brings it up again," Scarborough said. "But if you talk to him, he would still be talking about that Hunter Biden flew on Air Force Two with Joe Biden when Joe Biden was president, and there's absolutely no awareness whatsoever. There's this false equivalency, false flattening of the earth, and really, they look like total fools. At some point they'll figure it out, but that point is not now."
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