'What planet are they from?' Morning Joe astonished by Trump's latest rally in COVID-ravaged Florida
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough questioned President Donald Trump's decision to hold a mostly maskless rally in Florida soon after testing positive for the coronavirus.
The president rallied closely packed supporters Monday night in Sanford, and the "Morning Joe" host worried about the long-term impact on a state that has struggled for months to contain the deadly pandemic.
"We don't need doctors to tell us the numbers, but we're getting new cases and a real fear among medical health care experts that we're exploding into another terrible time," Scarborough said. "I was watching last night as Ron DeSantis, the governor of this state, who is supposed to be setting an example, which, of course, he hasn't from the very beginning, was going through the crowd, high-fiving, you know? Wiping his nose, high-fiving people, everything."
The spectacle reminded him of authoritarian regimes in other countries.
"I thought back to images of these troubling regimes that came in turbulent times," Scarborough said. "You know, you see the old black-and-white films of these crowds, of these mobs, and you wonder what planet did they come from, and then you realize as you're watching it in real time that they're from my home state."
"I am quite confident, not 50 years from now or 20 years from now, but five years from now people are going to look back on that scene and go, 'What the hell were they thinking?'" Scarborough added. "They have grandparents, they have older mom and dads, they have kids with underlying conditions. What were they thinking? What was the governor thinking? What was the president of the United States thinking? What point was [chief of staff] Mark Meadows trying to prove yesterday? What point was [Sen.] Mike Lee trying to prove yesterday? What point was [Sen.] Lindsey Graham trying to prove yesterday?"